● 10.28.14

● Links 28/10/2014: SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, Canonical OpenStack Distro

Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Contributing upstream to the Linux kernel is hugely important to Altera, says Findlay Shearer, a senior manager of product marketing at the Silicon Valley-based chip maker.

• Altera’s kernel code helps ensure Linux developers can work on their SoCFPGA architecture, which integrates FPGA (field programmable gate array) devices with ARM processors into a single SoC (system-on-chip). This enables innovation in the embedded industry, based on Altera’s SoCFPGA chips.

• Want to try a new OS sans commitment? Linux on USB sticks can be the first step to replacing Windows XP with an open source desktop such as Xubuntu.

Desktop

• Seeing that Chromebooks are enjoying demand from the education sector, brand vendors such as Dell, Asustek Computer and Lenovo have started becoming aggressive about the market, while Acer, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Samsung Electronics will also launch new products to defend their market shares, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

• Chromebooks are a combination thin client and GNU/Linux desktop/notebook computer. They mostly rely on web applications for users. The operating system just keeps the lights on and manages local resources, but it’s still GNU/Linux underneath that browser.

Kernel Space

• This is an update of my previous attempt at summarizing this discussion.

Graphics Stack

• Linux video expert Gwenole Beauchesne has landed some Video Acceleration API (VA-API) improvements for the open-source Intel driver.

• These ISOs have been built by SVN revision 3013, and are based on Utopic, with Wayland/Weston 1.6+ (master).

• Rebecca Black OS, what’s become the most common Linux Live CD/USB environment for showing off Wayland progress and various Wayland-related features for the Linux desktop, is out in updated form. The revised Rebecca Black OS spins offer various new features and are riding off the very latest Wayland code.

Benchmarks

• Our latest performance benchmarks of last week’s release of Ubuntu 14.10 is looking at the performance of an AMD Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” graphics card using the latest open-source (RadeonSI Gallium3D) graphics driver code compared to the Catalyst driver that’s packaged for Ubuntu 14.10. The latest open-source tests do include the in-development Linux 3.18 kernel and Mesa 10.4-devel.

Applications

• Every 6 months or so we produce a new stable release and for Tracker 1.2 we had some new exciting work being introduced. For those that don’t know of Tracker, it is a semantic data storage and search engine for desktop and mobile devices. Tracker is a central repository of user information, that provides two big benefits for the user; shared data between applications and information which is relational to other information (for example: mixing contacts with files, locations, activities and etc.).

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is already out for the Windows platform, and the Aspyr Media team is working on the port for Mac OS X and Linux. They have explained, in detail, just what kinds of challenges they are facing when dealing with such a complex title.

• One game that caught my attention more than the others was Forward to the Sky.

• Dead Island, a game developed by Techland and published by Deep Silver on Steam, along with all the available DLC, has now been launched on the Linux platform as well.

• Like Xoreos, GemRB, and OpenMW that seek to remake popular proprietary games/engines as open-source, Openage is another such project and it’s seeking to free the once popular Age of Empires II game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Porting KDE Telepathy to Qt 5 and Plasma 5

• I started working on that port back in the last KDE Telepathy sprint in Barcelona last April. Back then, I started to work on it because I have been doing heavy usage of the KTp plasmoids back when using the KDE 4 Plasma series and I didn’t want to live without them. Back then, I only ported the minimum parts of ktp-common-internals so it would work with KF5, as well as the plasmoids. It was quite some work, but definitely worth it since I’ve been using them ever since, and it’s worked wonderfully.

• Most of the window decorations available for KWin are not native decorations but themes for a native theme engine, such as deKorator, Smaragd, QtCurve or my own Aurorae. Themes are much easier to design and to distribute than a native decoration which has to be implemented in C++ and be distributed by the Linux distribution. Thus themes are an important part of the decoration system.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Matthias Clasen did some weekend hacking to allow GtkInspector to work across different display connections, e.g. debugging a GTK application running in Wayland while GtkInspector is running under X11 or the HTML5 Broadway back-end.

Distributions

New Releases

• First out of the blocks of the pre-release distributions I looked at last week, is Makulu Linux Cinnamin Debian Edition.

• The LinHES Dev team is pleased to announce the release of LinHES R8.2!

• LinHES R8.2 brings updates to the kernel, system libraries, Service Menu options, MythTV 0.27.4, LinHES theme and many other parts of LinHES.

Screenshots

Ballnux/SUSE

• Suse has kicked out a new version of its enterprise-grade commercial Linux distribution, Suse Linux Enterprise 12, more than five years after the last major-version release.

• SUSE HAS RELEASED SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, its latest iteration of Linux for deploying and managing high availability enterprise class IT services in data centre and cloud environments.

• SUSE LLC, the longtime second fiddle of the commercial Linux universe, is introducing a brand new version of its flagship distribution that levels the playing field against arch-rival Red Hat Inc. on multiple key fronts while adding several distinctive enhancements. The launch comes two months after the German firm unveiled the latest release of its OpenStack offering.

Red Hat Family

• A mainly technical workshop for beginners and intermediate knowledged people that would like to build a RPM package from their own software or from software they like and use. It also covers the basics and gives useful hints to avoid common mistakes and adds recommendations about optimized build environments for reproducible results. Additionally there will be a live RPM packaging demonstration for a small software including the possibility for participants for a practical exercise by packaging another small software as RPM.

• We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-6.6…

Fedora

• One of the crucial duties of the new Fedora Council will be the selection of two to four 18-month objectives (and then finding people to own and drive each of them). Although the new body is not yet in place, this is to be a community conversation, so there’s no need to wait to start talking about what we want. (If this is new to you, you might want to read the Fedora Council charter and about upcoming community elections.)

Debian Family

• The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0

• In other words, for the most part, Linux users are in complete control of everything in/on their system. Linux will allow you to completely bugger your installation, because as a user you have the responsibility to know what you are doing. Fools are not suffered gladly when using Linux. You wanna play with the rm command? Go ahead…it’s your computer.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is spinning its own OpenStack distro to simplify deployment of Linux clouds and ensure its place in an expected cloud winners’ club.

• Mark Shuttleworth’s firm is today expected to roll the beta of its Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack.

• With Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) out of the way, Canonical has started working on Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), but it remains to be seen just how different it’s going to be. We put together a list of features that would be nice to have and that could be technically implemented.

• Kicking off our ‘Ubuntu at Ten Reader Survey’ was an obvious question: which version of Ubuntu served as your entry point. This aimed to find out the most popular ‘jump on’ point.

• Based on Canonical’s industry-leading OpenStack reference architecture and building on Ubuntu’s leading position as the most widely used OpenStack platform, the Canonical Distribution gives users the widest range of commercially-supported vendor options for storage, software-defined networking and hypervisor from Canonical and its OpenStack partners. It then automates the creation and management of a reference OpenStack based on those choices.

• Canonical has come forward today to announce the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack that offers various advantages over the free, community version of Ubuntu OpenStack.

Flavours and Variants

• Bodhi, a minimalistic Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that uses the E17 desktop environment, has reached version 3.0 RC2 and is now available for download and testing.

Devices/Embedded

• Luis Alves’ machine used a regular 68000 at 20 MHz, and got decent performance running ucLinux. An 8 MHz 68008 will only have about 20-25% of the performance of that system, which might be a problem. Maybe I should look into the availability of suitable 16-bit ROM and RAM chips before making a final decision.

Phones

Android

• Nextbit unveiled a cloud-based “Baton” service for CyanogenMod’s Android builds that enables sync and handoffs between devices, plus backup and restore.

Free Software/Open Source

• If you’ve been reading about the Internet of Things (IoT) market, you may be noticing that it is picking up steam with powerful partnerships and big name companies launching initiatives. Red Hat put up an extensive post recently illustrating that it is very focused on the concept of networking objects of all types, and we’ve covered the backing that organizations ranging from The Linux Foundation to Microsoft are putting behind the IoT market.

Events

• The Ceph Developer Summit (CDS) for the next major Ceph release called Hammer started today some hours ago (2014/10/28). It’s again a virtual summit via video conference calls.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Raspberry Pi platform is set to receive yet another Linux distribution, this time Firefox OS. Mozilla is now working to release its distribution on the mini PC in an effort to demonstrate just how versatile this OS really is.

SaaS/Big Data

• Among respondents to Computing’s recent data centre research programme, the hybrid cloud model is generating a lot of interest. Indeed, moving towards a hybrid model was the aim of 41 per cent of them (see figure 1).

• Hybrid cloud implies a close interconnectivity between a private cloud (i.e. a collection of physical and virtual systems used exclusively by one company) and the multi-tenant public cloud services exemplified by Google, Amazon and Microsoft Azure. This seamlessly integrated whole allows data, services and workloads to be moved between public and private clouds at will, with the administrator able to monitor and manage the whole system via a single dashboard.

• When you want to learn about object storage in OpenStack, John Dickinson is the guy to ask. John is the Director of Technology at SwiftStack, a company which relies on the OpenStack Swift project to provide unstructured data storage to customers around the world. He also serves as the Program Technical Lead (PTL) for OpenStack Swift and has been involved in the development of Swift since 2009.

• Despite a recent poor quarterly results report, IBM appears to be applying even more focus to its cloud services business. The company has announced an expansion of its global cloud network with a new cloud center in Mumbai, India and a new suite of cloud services for OpenStack. And these are just the latest components of IBM’s $1.2 billion investment in cloud centers in every major market worldwide.

• Chris Kemp spoke with TechRepublic about the founding of OpenStack and how he went from NASA’s first CTO of IT to startup founder.

BSD

• Interestingly the OpenBSD developers have decided to remove support for loadable kernel modules from the BSD distribution’s next release.

• DragonFlyBSD 3.8 will soon be succeeded by DragonFlyBSD 4.0. For those willing to help test, the release candidate to DragonFlyBSD 4.0.0 is now available.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GCL team is happy to announce the release of version 2.6.12, the latest achievement in the ‘stable’ (as opposed to ‘development’) series. Please see http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl for downloading information.

• GNU Icecat is now available on Fedora repositories.

Project Releases

• Digium, the Asterisk Company, announced the release of Asterisk 13, a production-ready Long Term Support (LTS) release that builds upon the changes made in the previous development release, Asterisk 12.

Openness/Sharing

• ‘Open’ products work a bit more like Ikea—you have all the right pieces and instructions but you have to make something out of it—a table or chair or whatever it may be. Ikea products are toolkits to make things. When we’re talking about software most buyers are thinking about what they get out of the box, so a toolkit is not a product to our consumers.

• If you are in the market for a new Bluetooth speaker you might be interested in the SoGo Mini which offers a customisable casing together with an open source smartphone application.

• SwiftStack wants to make open source storage software work really well on commodity hardware, says founder and CEO Joe Arnold, whose OpenStack Swift-based software-defined storage company recently raised a $16 million Series B funding round.

• A graphic designer based in Milano, Italy is already discovering the usefulness of his 3D printer. Pietro Corraini, author of How to Break the Rules of Brand Design in 10+8 Easy Exercises, is a father of two. Recently he was left without a solution to a major problem. His 2-year-old daughter, Stella, had been bringing him tiny little flowers that she had picked at the park and by the roadside.

Open Hardware

• World’s first completely open-source, 3D printed, humanoid robot has been developed in France.

Standards/Consortia

• A survey is being conducted to see if the sharing of information on how the European Union Member States are transposing European legislation can be improved. The results of this survey could potentially contribute to increased interoperability of the ICT systems that provide access to European legislation.

• In addition HTML5 will see much more better games get developed for the web, Mozilla using various technologies have shown off desktop-like games in terms of graphics, if this were to become mainstream we may see a shift from people using traditional desktop and laptop to devices like Chromebooks, although post-Snowden privacy concerns make this a more distant reality than it was before. HTML5 also brings with it native support for scalable vector graphics (SVG) and math (MathML), anotations important for East Asian typography and features to enable accessibility of rich applications.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Opium production in Afghanistan has increased by 4,000% since the start of the US/UK/Others occupation.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The U.S. Army now says that seven out of 10 young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible to become soldiers.

• The alarming reduction in the pool of prospective soldiers worries Army brass and they largely attribute it to three issues: obesity or health problems; lack of a high school education; and criminal histories.

• “There’s a reliance on an ever-smaller group of people to serve and defend the country,” said Maj. Gen. Allen Batschelet, commanding general for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky. “What do we do about that and how do we address that concern?

• The jogger who was manhandled to the ground after running into David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has said he had “no idea” why police officers jumped on him.

• Dean Farley, a 28-year-old hospital worker from Leeds, questioned the Prime Minister’s security arrangements.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• OK, so fiery anti-Americanism is the belief that the United States desires a unipolar world where it calls the shots. Does anyone doubt US elites think otherwise?

Privacy

• Verizon Wireless has been subtly altering the web traffic of its wireless customers for the past two years, inserting a string of about 50 letters, numbers, and characters into data flowing between these customers and the websites they visit.

• That’s the noise that Attkisson’s Apple computer was making at 3:14 one morning. A Toshiba laptop computer issued by CBS News did the same thing a day earlier, around 4 a.m. All this goes down in October 2012, right in the midst of the Benghazi story. A person who’s identified as “Jeff” warns Attkisson: “I’ve been reading your reports online about Benghazi. It’s pretty incredible. Keep at it. But you’d better watch out.” “Jeff,” like several of the names in “Stonewalled,” is a pseudonym.

• In a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly…

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