● 10.29.14

● Links 29/10/2014: Ubuntu Touch Tablet, Puppy Linux 6.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:29 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The truth is, Linux — and the ecosystem of Free and Open Source software around it — isn’t perfect. Heck, I regularly give Linux a hard time for its shortcomings, myself. But the reality is… it’s absolutely fantastic for both end users and companies building software/hardware solutions alike.

• According to Schestowitz, although the site continues to be under fire, he and his team have developed methods to deal with the attacks.

• “The DDOS attacks against both sites are still going on,” he wrote last night in an email in response to our query. “There’s now an aggressive filtering software in place banning a lot of machines which it suspects to be part of the attacks. It helps reduce the frequency of downtime.”

• That’s good news. Although we have no idea of the traffic figures for TechRights, it’s certainly a popular free software site. Tux Machines is probably even more popular, with thousands of visitors daily depending on it for links to the latest news on Linux and FOSS. It’s nice to know it’s seemingly dependable again, even as it continues to come under attack.

• To me, this is quite an important period because the only reason I migrated to GNU/Linux was to be free of crashes. Later I was glad I did because of performance, lack of malware, avoidance of the EULA from Hell, easy back-ups and installation, easy management, etc. Many other famous migrations happened around the same time and I would bet stability was an issue for them too. Certainly cost, flexibility, and independence from M$ were issues. Many businesses were spending ~$1000 per seat per annum just to keep things running, so it’s not just about licences or being “cheap”. FLOSS is the right way to do IT.

• That’s a heck of a long way from Steve Ballmer proclaiming back in 2001 that “Linux is a cancer.” In the years since then Microsoft certainly attacked Linux like it was a cancer — doing everything from sponsoring SCO’s copyright attack on Linux to claiming that Linux violated unnamed Microsoft patents to endless FUD assaults.

Server

• Containerization technology has been a game-changer, powering Docker and other transformative software solutions. It’s also garnered its share of criticisms about performance, security, and resiliency.

• But one of the creators of Parallels, a key containerization technology on Linux, is pushing back against what he feels are pervasive myths about containers — many of which, he argues, are rooted in misunderstandings of how to use them and what they’re for.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation recently announced its 2014 Linux training scholarship winners.This year marked the strongest demand we’ve ever seen for this program with more than 1,000 applications received. Reading through the submissions it became clear that learning Linux is widely recognized as a smart strategy for building a successful career. From every corner of the world, up and coming developers and sysadmins want to be able to tap into this massive opportunity. This is also represented in our Intro to Linux MOOC as well with nearly 300,000 registrations from more than 100 countries.

• Many new features, even more bugfixes!

• Lennart Poettering announced the release today of systemd 217 and it’s quite a big update.

Graphics Stack

• While there hasn’t been much to report on lately with regard to major OpenGL 4.x advancements, the OpenGL 4.0+ support is still being worked on by the open-source developers wishing to expose GL4 compliance within the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau Linux graphics drivers, among other potential Mesa/Gallium3D drivers.

• For those stuck running on the R300g driver, which supports the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series and older GPUs, you really should consider upgrading your graphics card and likely your system. But if you’re set on using the R300g driver going into the foreseeable future, you might as well upgrade Mesa.

• Here’s the first RC for X server 1.17.

• Keith Packard has made available the first test release for the upcoming X.Org Server 1.17 release. This release is coming a bit late but Keith is still hoping to have xorg-server 1.17.0 ready for release at the end of the year or around early January.

• While there hasn’t been much to report on lately with regard to major OpenGL 4.x advancements, the OpenGL 4.0+ support is still being worked on by the open-source developers wishing to expose GL4 compliance within the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau Linux graphics drivers, among other potential Mesa/Gallium3D drivers.

Benchmarks

• As a follow-up to last week’s Ubuntu 14.04 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 AMD Performance Comparison and yesterday’s Radeon R9 290: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst driver comparison, here’s taking things further in looking at the performance of the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver in several configurations while compared against the closed-source AMD Catalyst graphics driver as found on Ubuntu 14.10.

• These results are much more interesting than the earlier two-disk HDD benchmarks now using solid-state storage and having bought four Intel Series 530 120GB SSDs for making this an interesting RAID comparison. Four of the Intel SSDSC2BW120A4K5 solid-state drives were used in their 120GB capacity. Each of these solid-state drives retail for $75~80 USD and features sequential reads up to 540MB/s and sequential writes up to 480MB/s with its Serial ATA 3.0 interface. The 2.5-inch SSD 530 Series drive is rated by a five-year warranty and uses 20nm Intel NAND MLC memory.

Applications

• When people hear about Linux and terminals they usually cringe, especially if they are new to the platform. That doesn’t have to be the case and the terminal is usually your friend and you can even enhance it. This is where Guake comes into play, and what a truly a marvelous tool it is!

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The newest Humble Bundle is live and this time around features quite a few Linux débuts. Currently there’s a total of 8 games in the bundle with more to come.

• OpenMW, an open source implementation of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind game engine and functionality, has been updated yet again and is now at version 0.33.0.

• Aspyr Media are starting to be fan favourites with their open communication. They can’t give full details of course, but they have given us hints about more games coming to Linux.

• The Halloween-themed Humble Indie Bundle 13 is now available for the next two weeks where you can pay-what-you want for a collection of cross-platform royalty-free games.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Since LXQt is finally came on 0.8.0 to Qt5, and we’re actively working on Fedora 21, Qt5 builds and KDE Frameworks, and there are needs to jump and do at least the first usable state of the project, i jumped the wagon.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• For some time I’ve been considering what to do about Jovie which was previously known as ktts (KDE Text To Speech). Since before the first KDE Frameworks release actually, since kdelibs used to host a dbus interface definition for the KSpeech dbus interface that ktts and then Jovie implemented. I have a qt5 frameworks branch of Jovie, but it didn’t make much sense to port it, since a lot of it is or could become part of the upcoming QtSpeech module. So Jovie has no official qt5 port and wont be getting one either.

• The exiting news is that following some discussion and some wavering we will be switching to Plasma 5 by default. It has shown itself as a solid and reliable platform and it’s time to show it off to the world.

• So, i was “politely” annoying people on kde channels last days because i found some interconnected pieces of KDE software that is not really integrated, but are screaming to do that.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Distributions

Reviews

• In the past I have reviewed MakuLinux MATE Edition, which came with a very polished and beautiful interface, but also bundled in the ISO a big number of applications to be installed. At the time the MATE edition made a very good impression on me, so I kept a close eye on the development of Makulu.

New Releases

• Linux is pretty darn awesome when used on super-powerful machines. However, where the kernel really shines is when operating systems leverage it for less powerful computers. In other words, Linux can breathe new life into old computers thanks to lightweight distributions.

Ballnux/SUSE

• More than five years after its last major release, SUSE has made available version 12 of its enterprise operating system. The release, on Monday, comes, as usual, with a host of changes.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is looking to lure startups to its web of services with a new program that gives budding businesses free access to OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s public cloud app development platform.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of the OpenShift Startup Program. This free program uses OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s public cloud application and development platform, to help startups build and grow their business.

Fedora

• Sunday, October 26th, 2014, at Nha Trang university, Nha Trang, Vietnam, the Nha Trang IT Day 2014 was taken place. During that day, the Fedora Join workshop was held to introduce about Fedora Project to professors, teachers and students who work and study at NTU and nearby universities and to help them to join into.

• makuluToday in the Linux newsfeeds is Sean Michael Kerner’s coverage of a newly reported Wget Symlink Vulnerability. MakuluLinux 1.0 Cinnamon was released today and two community reviews give users a nice introduction. The Systemd debate continues and The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack was announced. And finally today, Bryan Lunduke shares “what it’s like living on a Chromebook.”

• Instead of relval (for a change) I spent some of my non-work time today working on ownCloud packaging (I’m the owner/’primary contact’/whatever for the ownCloud package, these days).

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Unity 8, seen in the Ubuntu Desktop Next images and Ubuntu Touch phones, removes a controversial feature branded “spyware” by some and fixes one of Ubuntu’s most long-standing complaints. When Unity 8 is stable and ready, Ubuntu won’t send your local searches over the web and show you Amazon product results anymore, quelling some longstanding fears in the open-source community.

• Kristian’s latest patches being made public are enabling support for vertex shaders to be generated using Intel’s SIMD8 scalar back-end for Broadwell hardware and newer. “With Broadwell we have the option to run vertex shaders in scalar (SIMD8) mode which potentially gives us better throughput and more vertices per thread dispatch. This patch series implements this by repurposing our [fragment shader] backend to also work for vertex shaders.”

• Today we’ve received some information a device dubbed the “UT One” that is an Ubuntu Touch tablet powered by an Intel Bay Trail processor and aims to ship in December.

• The makers of the Ubuntu Linux operating system for notebooks, desktops, and servers have been working on a version for phones and tablets… and hope to see the first of those devices ship later this year or early in 2015.

• A couple of months ago, Canonical released Ubuntu Developer Tools Center (UDTC), a project to “enable quick and easy setup of common developers needs on Ubuntu”.

• The Windows operating systems is going out the front door in China and its place will be taken by a Linux distribution that will be used by the authorities and the governing body. The problem is that there is no real alternative, although at least one OS might be ready for the task, and that is Ubuntu Kylin.

• Unity is the desktop that just can’t get much respect in the Linux world. It has been criticized since the day it first appeared, with many Linux users being quite vocal in their disgust at Canonical’s decision to include Unity instead of GNOME. But is Unity really that reviled? A new survey by OMG Ubuntu indicates that most Ubuntu users actually seem to like Unity.

• One week and 15,000 responses later, the results of our Ubuntu at 10 Reader Survey are finally ready to serve up. And they make for some fascinating mid-morning coffee-break reading.

Devices/Embedded

• Inverse Path is readying a tiny, open-spec “USB Armory” SBC that runs Linux or Android on an i.MX53, and offers Trustzone, secure boot, and USB emulation.

• Ittia announced a design win for its lightweight embedded DB SQL database in Wasserbauer’s uClibc Linux based “Butler Gold” robot designed to feed cattle.

Phones

• So Apple gave its Q3 results (talking calendar quarter of course so its July-September numbers) and this includes the first few days of sales of the new iPhone 6 models. How was it? 39.3 million units. Thats up 12% from Q2 and up 16% from the same period one year ago. That is not good enough, as the market is growing far faster, so iPhone market share is again down (year-on-year). Because of the iPhone launch pattern of one launch date per year, the quarterly sales move up and down a lot, so the Apple view should always be considered with the annual view. But yes, market share now in Q3 is about 12.4% which is down from 13.3% a year ago same period. Apple’s iPhone market share year-on-year has now fallen 8 consecutive quarters, down from the peak market share of 23.9% in Q1 of 2012 to essentially half of that, 12.4% today.

Tizen

• We previously reported that the Tizen based Samsung Gear S was looking at a release date of 24th October, which happened to be last week by many of the major UK online tech retailers. Well, as what happens quite often in the Tech world the release has been delayed, and we are now looking at the week commencing 11 November 2014 for its UK launch. No specific reason has been given by Samsung to the delay.

Android

• Google’s approach for rolling out the latest version of Android, Lollipop, is a little different. There are the usual things we see every year — a new Nexus phone and a new Nexus tablet — but instead of a big event, the company is posting details in blog posts and on the main Android site. So if you’re tracking the rollout closely, you probably have a sense of what’s new and what’s cool in the OS. If you’re not, though, getting a sense of what Lollipop is actually like and what it actually does isn’t easy.

• YouTube has been in the news recently based on reports that it plans to launch paid subscription services, but there is another bit of interesting news about the popular video hosting and streaming company: It has launched an open source project called YouTube WatchMe for Android, available on GitHub, that offers an app designed to facilitate YouTube Live Streaming Events on Android devices.

• In today’s Android roundup: Twelve of the best features in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Plus: Google releases its Google Fit health app, and popular music app djay 2 is now available for Android

• Google’s approach for rolling out the latest version of Android, Lollipop, is a little different. There are the usual things we see every year — a new Nexus phone and a new Nexus tablet — but instead of a big event, the company is posting details in blog posts and on the main Android site. So if you’re tracking the rollout closely, you probably have a sense of what’s new and what’s cool in the OS. If you’re not, though, getting a sense of what Lollipop is actually like and what it actually does isn’t easy.

Free Software/Open Source

• Why? The majority of them have switched to open source because they perceive open source development programs as having better performance and reliability. This, as Hammond observed, is a change. “Open source used to be popular because of the lower cost. Now the cost of tools is the least important element for developers.”

• Apache has seen amazing success over the last 15 years. Not only do ASF projects impact almost every area of computing, but the Apache License, our Contributor License Agreements (CLAs), and our pattern of open, collaborative development (often known as “The Apache Way”) continue to influence Open Source projects outside of the ASF. Many Apache projects have gone on to build huge, successful ecosystems around themselves, and other established projects have joined the ASF to grow and diversify their community.

Events

• Now that the mega-conference week that was is in the books — Ohio LinuxFest, All Things Open and Seattle GNU/Linux Conference are all history for this year — generally the Linux/FOSS world catches its collective breath and starts thinking about shows in 2015.

• So today’s challenge for hackers, I think, is putting that advice into practice by writing a new generation of free software programs with strong crypto baked in as a matter of course. That means strong crypto in connectivity software (more things like OpenVPN, TOR, Commotion); in communications programs (MailPile, Cryptocat, RedPhone), and in content applications (FreeNet, GNUnet).

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla Distinguished Engineer Robert O’Callahan reports that the Spidermonkey JavaScript engine, used by the Firefox web browser, has surpassed the performance of Google’s V8 engine (used by Chrome) and Apple’s JavaScript Core (used by Safari) on three popular benchmarks: Mozilla’s own Kraken, Webkit’s SunSpider and Google’s Octane.

SaaS/Big Data

• Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Sage Weil, founder and chief architect of Ceph and a speaker at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Paris.

• OpenStack is powering the next generation of cloud services – are you ready to work with them?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Those who know me know that I am partial to OpenOffice, an open source project that I contribute to. So I am extremely pleased to see it continue to advance in all fronts. Since coming to Apache, OpenOffice’s name recognition has grown from 24% to 39% and the user share has grown from 11% to 18%, while keeping user satisfaction constant. This is a testament to the hard work of the many talented volunteers at Apache.

• Comparing LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice is like comparing identical twins. Even people who know them well have trouble distinguishing one from the other, and, when you find a difference, it is often trivial. All the same, the differences are growing, and LibreOffice has at least eleven advantages over OpenOffice – see the list below.

Funding

• SwiftStack, one of the lead contributors to the open-source Swift OpenStack storage project, this week announced that it has raised a new Series B $16 million round of funding. Total funding for SwiftStack now stands at $23.6 million.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The Center for International and Intercultural Communication (ZiiK) at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) has been helping with the reconstruction of academic organizations in Afghanistan since 2002. Under the supervision of the Berlin IT lecturer, Dr. Nazir Peroz, Director of the ZiiK, computer centers have been established at five college locations in Afghanistan.

Licensing

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• A new open-source GPU design has been published designed to run on FPGAs… What makes this “open hardware” project more interesting than past designs is that their compute unit was designed around AMD’s public “Southern Islands” instruction set architecture.

Programming

• For the first time, Zend Server is now also available on IBM’s Power Linux platforms. Zend has been available for years on IBM i, but has not been available for Linux running on IBM’s Power servers. IBM has had a busy year for Power, launching its Power8 server systems portfolio and doubling down on Linux.

Standards/Consortia

• The U.K. government employee added, “Yet we still have a huge .pdf mountain which we hate, and do our best to segment and slice. But to stop the remaining .pdf mountain getting any higher requires that Word documents stop being the default way government communicates with itself. We’ve made a start with HTML and Open Document Format becoming our adopted open standards for documents.

• Levels of inter-departmental and inter-agency alignment and agreement will need to be be Herculean…to…agree on standards,” he said.

• Nathaniel Heller, founder of the transparency and ethics nonprofit Global Integrity, said it’s important to figure out “how to get away from PDF ghettos as a way of transmitting information.” He added, “what’s really needed for this sort of dense information — and IG reports are a classic example — to be made more useful to, say, my mother is context, analysis, and summaries…My gut is that it takes someone, whether an IG office itself or other infomediaries, to tell us a bit about why a particular case should matter.”

• In-browser Skype calls are on the horizon after Microsoft backs ORTC and WebRTC technology

• After nearly 10 years of development, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has promoted the HTML5 specification to Recommendation status, its highest level of maturation, effectively making the markup language a formal web standard.

Leftovers

• It was the summer of 1994, and WIRED had been covering the digital revolution for nearly a year and a half. Personal computers were linking up, people were logging on, and the whole thing was crashing through society like a “Bengali typhoon,” as WIRED founder and editor-in-chief Louis Rossetto famously described it.

Science

• sHere, NASA photographer Joel Kowsky captures the moment of a “catastrophic anomaly” on the Antares rocket just after it lifted off from Pad-0A at the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The rocket’s upper half is clearly visible here, with what appears to be an explosion near its aft. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky.

Security

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states — in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week. That’s assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit on system costs, which is set to expire that same year.

Finance

• The identity of the sole bidder in the auction to sell more than 6,000 of Detroit’s foreclosures is no longer a mystery. Herb Strather, a local casino and real estate developer, won the lot for just under $3.2 million. “This is more than just an acquisition of parcels. It’s an opportunity to redevelop the city I was born in and I plan to die in,” Strather said in an interview.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• People don’t like Congress, and yet most members of Congress get to keep their jobs.

Privacy

• When I first heard about Jeffrey Paul’s claim [NSFW] that OS X 10.10 Yosemite was leaking data to Apple’s servers, my first reaction was “yeah, yeah – that’s the way autosave is supposed to work.”

• But I was wrong.

• Yes, some people that have upgraded to Yosemite directly from Snow Leopard are being caught out by the way autosave works, something that the rest of us have got used to.

Civil Rights

• A new book published Tuesday, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, by New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau, details the close relations developed by the US government with Nazi war criminals during and after the Second World War.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• AT&T is being sued by the US government over allegations it misled millions of smartphone customers who were promised unlimited data plans but instead experienced slow speeds while browsing the Internet or watching streaming video.

• The Federal Trade Commission is suing AT&T because the second-largest US carrier throttles speeds of its unlimited data customers, a policy that the FTC describes as “deceptive” and “unfair.” In a press release, the FTC said AT&T has “misled millions of its smartphone customers” by slowing down their data speeds after they’ve used up a certain amount of data in a single month. AT&T has failed to make its throttling policies clear enough, according to the complaint. “The issue here is simple: ‘unlimited’ means unlimited,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. The Commission’s filing blasts AT&T for slowing customers down to the point where common tasks — watching video, streaming music, etc. — become “difficult or nearly impossible.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In a case of improbable timing, Led Zeppelin has simultaneously scored a new hit with the album containing Stairway to Heaven while firing back against allegations that it ripped off the opening notes of the legendary song.

• [...]

• The new release of the alternate “Sunset Sound” mix, however, provides no new clues to the controversy—even if it does shed new light on the song itself. If you listen very hard, you’ll notice the picked guitar intro once had a more haunting feel, with a reverb-like sound that makes it seem distant. And at the end, Jimmy Page momentarily restarts his guitar solo at a point when the familiar mix instead winds down into an anticlimax. While fans might debate the relative merits of these versions, one thing is certain: With the album climbing the charts, ever-more money is at stake in the legal battle.

• The RIAA has just submitted its latest list of “rogue” websites to the U.S. Government. The report includes many of the usual suspects and also calls out websites who claim that they’re protecting the Internet from censorship, specifically naming The Pirate Bay. “We must end this assault on our humanity and the misappropriation of fundamental human rights,” RIAA writes.

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