● 10.02.14

● Links 2/10/2014: Kano Brings GNU/Linux to Education, Fedora 21 Desktop Matures

Posted in News Roundup at 4:45 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Kano Computing, a startup that plays in the learn to code space by adding a step-by-step hand-holding layer atop the Raspberry Pi single-board microcomputer to make hacking around with code and learning about computational thinking child’s play, has shipped all the hardware kits in its first batch of crowdfunded orders and pre-orders.

• Linux rose to 1.16% while Windows dropped 0.12% down to 95.35% and OS X usage rose 0.05% to 3.42%. When it comes to Linux hardware status for the month, Linux users were mostly running with around 3GB of RAM, 77% used Intel processors, 1920 x 1080 was the most commn display size, and Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64-bit was the most popular distribution.

Server

• Elizabeth K. Joseph is an Automation and Tools Engineer at HP, who works on the OpenStack Infrastructure team running a totally open source infrastructure built for OpenStack development. In her upcoming talk for All Things Open, she outlines the tools her team uses, how doing their work in the open affects their operations, and what other organizations seeking to make their workflow more open can learn from HP’s experience.

• StackEngine remains in private alpha and has yet to unveil publicly the automation tools that it thinks will become a crucial part of the adoption of Docker and possibly other containerized virtualization platforms. But the company, whose co-founders Quillin and Eric Anderson have backgrounds at CopperEgg, Hyper9 and VMware, has already received backing in the form of $1 million seed funding from Silverton Partners and LiveOak Venture Partners.

Bias

• Corporate sector overwhelmingly dominates public TV governing boards

• [...]

• Last year, the issue of corporate influence over public television was thrust into the spotlight when the film Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream was broadcast by PBS affiliate WNET (New Yorker, 5/27/13; FAIR Blog, 5/21/13). The film examined the concentration of wealth and power in the United States by looking at the super-rich residents of 740 Park Avenue—who included then-WNET board member and major station donor David Koch, a billionaire industrialist well known for his donations to right-wing causes.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Last week I wrote about AMD working on a new VA-API state tracker for Gallium3D after the original VA-API support was dropped two years ago. That new state tracker has landed in mainline Mesa Git.

• Linux recently received an update to their AMD drivers dubbed the fglrx 14.41. The new driver was AMD’s first OpenCL 2.0 driver. Following close on the heels of this new driver, however are talks about test builds of “fglrx 14.50”. The next driver from AMD and the features listed for this next driver does seem a hell lot more exciting!

Applications

• Audacity is a free, open source digital audio editor and recording application. Edit your sounds using cut, copy, and paste features (with unlimited undo functionality), mix tracks, or apply effects to your recordings. The program also has a built-in amplitude-envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode, and a frequency-analysis window for audio-analysis applications. Built-in effects include bass boost, wah wah, and noise removal, and the program also supports VST plug-in effects.

• In this article I will overview the main things that make SMPlayer stand out of the crowd, putting it on the top of the video playback applications list. SMPlayer is written in Qt 4.8 and uses MPlayer2 for video playback. Personally I have only words of praise for this player, which is why I decided to write this review. So let’s proceed and see what the most important features of SMPlayer are.

Proprietary

• When Google first announced its cloud-centric Chrome OS platform, which is designed to use applications and data in the cloud while primarily eschewing applications that reside on the desktop, people came out of the woodwork citing popular applications that wouldn’t run on it. Among these applications, the Windows crowd made a big deal out of the fact that Photoshop wouldn’t run on Chrome OS. Photoshop, is, after all, a very sophisticated and popular application.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Dex is a beautiful looking side-scrolling RPG from Dreadlocks Ltd that has just landed on Linux. It’s currently in Early Access, so remember to watch out for those bugs!

• Dex was funded on Kickstarter back in December of last year, so it’s great to see another game that promised Linux support to deliver on it. It uses the Unity engine, so it should work as well as other Unity games.

• Despite Valve’s longstanding push to increase the profile of Linux gaming (and the Linux-based SteamOS that is still hanging out in beta), the growing list of Linux games on Steam remains dominated by smaller, independent titles and a few ports of big-name classics. So it’s worth paying attention to the fact that 2K Games has announced that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel will have full Linux/SteamOS support on the same day it launches on Windows machines and consoles, October 14. The announcement comes alongside news that 2K has also released a port of Borderlands 2 for SteamOS, and it’s offering the older game at a 75 percent discount to celebrate.

• The developers behind the hit survival game Rust have been hard at work on their next-generation branch and it is now the default. It brings a lot of changes with it.

• Counter Strike: Global Offensive was recently released for Linux gamers to much fanfare, but the client was a little on the flaky side. Thankfully as we know Valve support their games very well and have just put out a new update to improve it for us.

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was recently launched on Steam for Linux, and now users have just received the first major update for the game and it includes a few Linux-oriented changes.

• It’s been rumored for some time that Borderlands 2 was going to be getting some Linux treatment, but with the looming release of Pre-Sequel, due out on October 14, it seemed like we wouldn’t be getting it in time. Well, any Linux fan who hit Steam’s main page up last night was in for a bit of a surprise, as not only was it shown that Borderlands 2 was now available for Linux, but so too will Pre-Sequel be. That’s just… awesome.

• Fans of exploration platformer You Have to Win the Game can finally get their nostalgia sunglasses on for a new bout of precision platforming as the sequel, Super Win the Game, releases on Steam for Linux today.

• Borderlands 2, one of the best cooperative FPS action games ever made, has been released on the Linux platform and is available with a huge 75% price cut.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE 4.14 was released in August 2014 but I did not have time to write about new features in Cantor for that release.

• So, let’s fix it now!

• New backend: Lua

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Last week GNOME 3.14 was released. I’ve been using my jhbuild copy since last Wednesday, and have to say I’m most happy with the improvements this cycle brought. I wanted to talk a bit about it, and this is one of the reason of this post. As you can see in the release notes this version includes improvements around the whole stack: the network and sharing settings; the input system, with support for gestures and improved touchscreen support; the shell and a bunch of updated applications.

Distributions

• We’re picking our best Linux distributions for 2014. It’s always an odd task and this year we’ve decided to take the chance to delve into the genus behind the distros that we use every day. We’ve been inspired by the GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline at http://futurist.se/gldt which we’ve mentioned before, and decided that we’d explore why the major families in the GNU/Linux world sprang up and how they’ve evolved over the years.

New Releases

• Today we are pleased to release the next revision of the Black Lab Professional Desktop series. Black Lab Professional Desktop 6 offers the stability and redundancy of the current LTS technologies, with the tools and functionality that enterprise desktop users would expect. With this release we bring many new features that bridge the Linux desktop environment with your existing desktop environments. We also include utilities for deploying web applications and current web technologies.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

PCLinuxOS Magazine October 2014, Issue 93Welcome From The Chief EditorHappy 11th Birthday, PCLinuxOS!PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: agmgInkscape Tutorial: Sunset With StarsPick The Right Tool For The Jobms_meme’s Nook: WhoPCLinuxOS Recipe Corner: Ground Beef & Sausage ManicottiOctober Is Breast Cancer Awareness MonthGame Zone: So Many MeInkscape Tutorial: Smiling Jack-O-LanternPCLinuxOS Puzzled PartitionsGhostery Makes Ghosts Of Third Party TrackersScreenshot Showcase

Arch Family

• Chakra Linux, a distribution specifically built to take advantage of KDE Software Compilation and the Plasma desktop, has been promoted to version 2014.09.

• The KDE Community has just announced that a Beta version for the second Plasma 5 update has been released and that it’s now available for download. The changes are quite consistent and users should take a good look at the screenshots because they show the future of the KDE project.

Red Hat Family

• Here at Red Hat is pretty nice, you have all the commodities you could imagine like resting room with PlayStations and pool table etc. or massages room or a little gym. So you are sometimes tempted to skip work =P

• Remember when gigabyte drives were big? Recall when a terabyte of storage was enormous? Those days are long gone when your business is moving to petabytes. To manage that kind of storage you need a program that can handle “scale-out” file storage. For your colossal storage needs, Red Hat has a new open source, software-defined storage manager: Red Hat Storage Server 3 (RHSS).

Fedora

• It’s too late for this to happen for Fedora 21 but if getting the interest of enough Fedora stakeholders could potentially be approved by FESCo for Fedora 22 in 2015. The thread has been started within Dash as default shell.

• Christian’s lengthy blog post covers the Wayland session advancements for Fedora 21 although it still is run as the non-default session, software installation improvements for Fedora Workstation, and general user-interface polishing.

• Wayland in Fedora Workstation 21 is also an important milestone as it exemplifies the new development philosophy we are embarking on. Fedora has for a long time been known to be a linux distribution where a lot of new pieces become available first. The problem here is that it has also given Fedora bit of a reputation for being not as dependable as some other distributions or operating systems, which has kept a lot of people away from Fedora that I think would be inclined to use it otherwise.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Ubuntu is a very popular base and it’s used by too many systems to count. Ubuntu itself is based on Debian, but for now we’ll stick with Ubuntu. elementary was not supposed to be an operating system, and in fact it started its life just as a collection of themes and a few other packages that allowed users to make Ubuntu look different.

• The developers soon realized that they could do better than this and made their own operating system. Only two versions of it have been released until now, Jupiter and Luna. They are now working on a third one called Freya, which is in the Beta stages. What is happening with this incredible rate of adoption for this OS and why is it so popular?

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• The 2015 model of Honda Civic, Civic Tourer and CR-V will be the first vehicle to ship with Honda Connect, and that will be on the European models. Honda Connect looks nice, but a standalone infotainment system that can be used on any car is a much better idea.

• Its answer is Android One, and it hopes that the new for 2014 off-the-shelf package will stem the flow of handset manufacturers in China and India rolling their own flavors of Android from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Every manufacturer switching to Android One will benefit Google’s bottom line and tighten its grip on the so-called open ecosystem.

Free Software/Open Source

• When I first read that Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora would be changing careers to work full-time on behalf of women in open source communities, I never imagined it would lead so far so fast. Today, The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization with global reach, whose programs have helped create positive change for women in a wide range of communities beyond open source. Building on this foundation, imagine how much more they can do in the next four years! That’s why I’m pledging my continuing support, and asking you to join me.

• Open source is key to the development of the Internet of things (IoT). Therefore, the Eclipse Foundation is taking a hard look at IoT for Java developers. In fact, the Eclipse IoT community is making it easier for Java developers to connect and manage devices in an IoT solution by delivering at JavaOne 2014 an open IoT stack for Java developers. Based on open source and open standards, the Eclipse Open IoT Stack for Java simplifies IoT development by enabling Java developers to reuse a core set of frameworks and services in their IoT solutions. In addition to the core Open IoT Stack, a set of industrial frameworks are available to accelerate the process of creating home automation and SCADA factory automation solutions. “Our goal with this is to ensure that Java developers have a free and open-source platform for building IoT solutions,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse.

• Facebook is opening up its cookbooks — but these recipes won’t taste good from the kitchen. Chef is Facebook’s engineering framework, and Facebook engineers have decided to open source that technology.

• Back in July, when there were only a few details available about it, I covered the announcement of Inbox, an email-focused startup company founded by MIT graduates who had worked for Dropbox.

• I’ve been working on Telescope (an open source Hacker News-type app built with the Meteor JavaScript framework) for close to two years now, and along the way I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to make an open source project successful.

• On this week’s Structure Show, hear how Talko stood on the shoulders of AWS and Azure — and wielded the Opus codec, WebRTC, FreeSwitch and other open-source tools to build an app that actually makes voice calls worth making again.

• The much-anticipated chat service that Goldman Sachs has been rumored to be working on with startup messaging company Perzo was formally announced Wednesday under the brand name Symphony.

• The Linux Foundation has added another string to its virtualisation bow, with the launch of OPNFV, its project for an open-source network function virtualisation (NFV) platform.

• Rival telecom operators and infrastructure vendors lay down their swords to collaborate in an open source NFV consortium that will develop standards for productizing interoperable technology.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The first Firefox OS based media player has arrived on Kickstarter, in the form of a $25 open-spec HDMI stick that supports Chromecast-like content casting.

• The Matchstick, which has already zoomed past its Kickstarter campaign’s $100,000 funding goal, with 28 days still remaining, was teased back in June by Mozilla developer evangelist Christian Heilmann. The unnamed prototype was billed as an open source HDMI stick that runs Mozilla’s Linux-based Firefox OS and offers casting capabilities. Few details were revealed at the time except that the device used the same DIAL (DIscovery And Launch) media-casting protocol created by Netflix and popularized by Google’s Chromecast.

SaaS/Big Data

• Red Hat is a role model for other companies by proving that you can become a billion dollar company purely on Open Source technologies, without a single proprietary component. The company registered impressive revenues of over $1.53 billion (yes, that’s a ‘b’) in 2014.

Databases

• If you think Oracle’s only goal when it gained control of MySQL was to undermine it, Oracle has a message for you: Get over it.

• Speaking at the annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday, Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven said there was never any question of the database giant mothballing MySQL.

CMS

• Almost every person associated with the web industry realizes the fact that open source solutions tend to produce better and cost-effective results. And the open source feature can be considered as a crucial factor that led to the evolution of the most popular and extensively used CMS, WordPress. I doubt that WordPress would have received the same recognition as it enjoys today, without the open source feature. This post throws light on how open-source feature has been the driving force behind WordPress popularity, but before that let’s have an overview of what open source exactly means.

Business

• ERPAL for Service Providers is the world’s first open source ERP built on Drupal, a popular content management system.

Funding

• A little over two weeks ago, I told you about the Brothers Nielsen, Jared and JR, who produce short educational videos which teach Linux and other tech skills to nine to thirteen-year-olds under the “Hello World” banner — a name which should be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a “programming for dummies” course.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• To travel to Hanoi, Vietnam from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, we have to do two flights and my first flight was flying to Vientiane, Laos. I had to wait for 1 hour to transfer to Hanoi, Vietnam. Laos (WATTAY) International Airport was small, so I did not take any picture of it. Just after I landed like you see in the below picture. I departed from Phnom Penh at 5:50PM and arrived at WATTAY International Airport at 7:15PM and left there at 8:00PM and arrived Hanoi at 9:00PM.

• To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

Public Services/Government

• With Britain looking to cut it’s deficit the Government is looking to cut costs where it can including on the software-front by moving from proprietary solutions from the likes of Microsoft over to Free/Libre and Open Source solution. HealthWatch England, a part of the United Kingdom’s national health service, is the latest governmental body to move to open source solutions for some of their work.

Licensing

• It is a testament to the success of the Open Source Initiative’s (OSI) branding campaign for open source software that “open source” and “licensing” are functionally synonymous. To the extent that people are familiar with open source software, it is the source code released under a license that lets anyone see the “crown jewels” of a software program as opposed to an opaque binary, or black box that hides its underpinnings.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• Open source has contributed to 3D printing in such a tremendous way. Without the open sourcing of many desktop 3D printers several years ago, the space would not be nearly as advanced as it currently is. Open source allows for brilliant people to take brilliant ideas and products, and then develop them further through the implementation of their own ideas. Open sourcing is not for companies looking to make huge profits, although it definitely still remains possible. Open sourcing is meant for those individuals who believe that the ideology behind technology should be for the greater good of mankind, not for the profits on certain individuals. We have seen many companies originate as part of an open source movement, only then to slowly migrate into closing off the rights to their designs, through the filing of patents and other means.

Programming

• ownCloud is one of the biggest open source project written in PHP if you look into the latest statistics. It is used for the server part of ownCloudas most of you know. We use other technologies like C++ and Qt for the Desktop Clients, Java for the Android app and Objective-C for iOS, JavaScript for the web-interface and more. But the heart of ownCloud is the server component which is using PHP 5.3 or higher..

Leftovers

• The British National Party has expelled its former leader, Nick Griffin, over allegations that he harassed members and told “lies” about its top brass.

• Mr Griffin, who stood down as leader of the BNP in July, was found guilty of a string of offences by a party conduct committee, which released a statement that said Mr Griffin was “trying to cause disunity by deliberately fabricating a state of crisis” in the party.

• The British National party has expelled former leader Nick Griffin for allegedly “trying to cause disunity” in a bid to destabilise the organisation.

• China’s foreign minister made it clear Beijing would not allow other countries to meddle into its ‘internal affairs’, responding in this way to US Secretary of State’s call for Beijing to grant Hong Kong the “highest possible degree of autonomy.”

• The American and the Chinese heads of foreign offices exchanged their views on the massive protests in Hong Kong before their talks at the US State Department on Wednesday.

Security

• More details are now public on the open-source Xen hypervisor vulnerability that triggered full Amazon, Rackspace and IBM cloud reboots.

• Finding bugs isn’t an act of charity; it’s a time-consuming process that researchers should be rewarded for. That’s a fact that Google understands well and is now increasing the amount of money it pays out to security researchers for disclosing bugs.

Censorship

• The European Union Court of Justice ruling of 13 May 2014 on a case brought by Google Spain highlighted the problems for the protection of freedom of expression and the right to information posed by the right to de-indexation from search engine results and, more broadly, the right to be forgotten. Privacy and freedom of expression are fundamental rights of equal value (articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and articles 8 and 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). Whenever one conflicts with the other, a balance must be reached under a judge’s authority because, as a matter of principle, one cannot be given more importance than the other.

Privacy

• Darkcoin this week announced that it has exited beta and is now ready for mainstream use. Also, the software’s code is now open source.

• Darkcoin — a Bitcoin competitor — is the first fully open source cryptocurrency with financial privacy built directly into the software, its developers claimed.

• U.S. intelligence agents have broad authority to spy on U.S. companies as long as they are “believed to have some relationship with foreign organizations or persons” — a description that could conceivably apply to any company with foreign shareholders, subsidiaries, or even employees—according to newly released government documents published this morning by the ACLU.

• Executive Director of Open Rights Group, Jim Killock said:

• “This will make it very convenient for the government to carry on with mass surveillance and ignore future legal decisions limiting GCHQ’s whole population profiling. It is clear is that this government is determined to reduce the human rights protections available to ordinary people in order to avoid facing limitations on its own powers. But it is precisely these limitations that allow democracies to hold governments to account.”

Civil Rights

• But will Ferguson shift media ideas on ‘fixing’ black men?

• In May of 2011, Wisconsin Republicans took the rather extraordinary step of stopping work on the budget to pass a voter ID bill in advance of the recall elections. Earlier this year, Walker vowed to call the legislature back into session to pass a new voter ID law if courts didn’t ultimately uphold the measure, which lower courts had blocked.

• There was never any doubt that the accusation of terrorism against Moazzam Begg was, once again, a tissue of politically motivated lies. What is still more appalling, I am told by a Home Office source that the decision to arrest and detain him was taken by Theresa May herself. This involvement of politicians in the abuse of individuals by the state is appalling.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In the wake of the debate on the Telecom Single Market, which is becoming quite intense within the Council of the European Union, La Quadrature du Net has joined other organisations, consumers groups and industry representatives in sending to Member States representatives in Brussels a letter urging them to protect to Net neutrality in the European Union.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Following the coming in to force yesterday of the copyright exception for parody, ORG wonders whether the use of parliamentary broadcasts in parodies is now allowed.

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