● 11.06.14

● Links 7/11/2014: War Thunder on GNU/Linux, KaOS ISO 2014.11

Posted in News Roundup at 8:10 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Marianna Tessel, credited with building VMware’s engineering efforts in the enterprise, hops to Docker, which is portrayed as a VMware killer in some camps.

Kernel Space

Benchmarks

• Following the recent Btrfs RAID: Native vs. Mdadm comparison, the dual-HDD Btrfs RAID benchmarks, and four-SSD RAID 0/1/5/6/10 Btrfs benchmarks are RAID Linux benchmarks on these four Intel SATA 3.0 solid state drives using other file-systems — including EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs with Linux 3.18.

Applications

Proprietary

• TeamViewer is a popular application for remote control, desktop sharing, file transfer, online meetings and more, that’s available for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Android and iPhone.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It was on this day two years ago that the Steam Linux client went into beta following the many exclusive Steam Linux stories and after being over at Valve’s headquarters to learn about their ambitious Linux plans.

• Back in June we wrote about the War Thunder MMO game coming to Linux and today — on the second anniversary of Steam for Linux — the game has publicly surfaced for gamers. This war combat game is free-to-play while still being in its beta state.

• The highly popular War Thunder MMO game has officially launched on Linux. We don’t have many decent MMO games, so is it worth a shot?

• War Thunder is MMO game developed by Gaijin Entertainment that lets users control World War II’s military aviation, armored vehicles, and fleets, and now it available on Linux.

• I’m a bit late on actually covering this, but any fans of Postal 2 will know that the Linux version is rather far behind Windows in terms of updates due to how busy Icculus is, so RunningWithScissors has taken it in-house.

• StuntRally, a free and open source racing game that features over 150 tracks and lots of cars, has been promoted to version 2.5 and is now available for download.

• Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten is a great mix of RPG and Tower Defence that is being upgraded as “DQ1HD” to feature better graphics and it will use the Haxe language, so no more need for Adobe Air!

• Worms Reloaded, a turn-based action game developed and published on Steam for Linux by Team17, is now available for purchase with an 80% discount.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The latest monthly update to the KDE Frameworks libraries are now available. KDE Frameworks 5.4 continues adding on new functionality and fixes to these KDE add-on components used to form the next-generation KDE desktop experience.

• When the user deletes something, a notification pops up, notifying that an important thing has been deleted: it offers an action to undo the deletion.

Distributions

New Releases

• KaOS is proud to announce the availability of the November release of a new stable ISO. Since August updates were done to a good 1200 packages and to stay with the policy that a first pacman -Syu should be an uncomplicated one for new users means a new ISO is needed.

Ballnux/SUSE

• The openSUSE 13.2 release debuted this week, providing users with a long list of new and updated features.

• Linux is typically thought of as a server or cloud operating system in the enterprise, though it does have desktop applicability as well. Among the Linux distributions that provide enterprise Linux desktop support is SUSE, which updated its SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) to version 12 on Oct. 27. The SLED 12 release is the first major update to SLED since version 11 debuted back in 2009. A lot has happened in the Linux market since 2009—in the desktop space in particular. One of the big changes has been the emergence of the GNOME 3 Linux desktop, which has a different user interface and workflow than its predecessors. Some in the Linux community consider the GNOME 3 desktop to be somewhat disruptive from an enterprise stability perspective. To that end, one of the key features of SLED 12 is a choice from multiple flavors of the GNOME 3 desktop, including a classic mode, which integrates the common user interface navigation element used in GNOME 2 inside of a GNOME 3 context. SLED 12 also benefits from innovations that are present on the server side, including the btrfs file system, which enables snapshot and system rollback functionality. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 release.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• As has become regrettably typical for the Fedora project, the first Fedora 21 beta is well behind schedule. According to the current schedule on the Fedora wiki, the final version will arrive about a month late, on 9 December. That is if nothing goes wrong during the beta testing phase that’s just started.

• A month might not sound so bad, but it has been nearly 12 months since Fedora 20 arrived, which is not good for a distro that supposedly updates every six months.

Debian Family

• As you might know, GNOME provides GNOME-Software for installation of applications via PackageKit. In order to work properly, GNOME-Software needs AppStream metadata, which is not yet available in Debian. There was a GSoC student working on the necessary code for that, but the code is not yet ready and doesn’t produce good results yet. Therefore, I postponed AppStream integration to Jessie+1, with an option to include some metadata for GNOME and KDE to use via a normal .deb package.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, details what the new LXC container effort is all about.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab), a non-profit open source software-defined network (SDN) tool development ecosystem out of Stanford University and UC Berkeley, has unveiled an SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS). ON.Lab ONOS community founding members include AT&T and NTT Communications, who would appear to be in line to implement ONOS in their networks in the near future.

• Not all the action is happening at the OpenStack Summit in Paris. In a bold move, cloud specialist Joyent has announced it’s open-sourcing its core technology. That includes software that competes directly with OpenStack and enables high-performance use of container technology like Docker. The newly open projects enable easy management of containers at scale.

• ON.Lab pitches ONOS, an open source SDN controller that offers more scalability than OpenDaylight. Competition could be good and bad.

• Analog Devices, Freescale, PNI Sensor Corp., and the MEMS Industry Group formed the Accelerated Innovation Community, a group dedicated to providing open-source algorithms for sensors. AIC also plans to announce an I/O standard for sensors in collaboration with the MIPI Alliance.

• Engineers shouldn’t have “to reinvent the wheel on common algorithms every time they want to add or change functionality in their product,” said Karen Lightman, executive director of the MEMS Industry Group (MIG). “Access to an open-source library of introductory algorithms fundamentally changes the development paradigm.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Phones running the operating system have been gradually hitting various markets across Europe since last year, and have since been released in Brazil, India, and Asian markets too. Now the Mozilla Foundation is looking to expand Firefox OS’ reach to Africa.

SaaS/Big Data

• Information interchange has reached all new levels. Now, much more than before, organizations are relying on large data sets to help them run, quantify and grow their business. Just a few years ago, we were already working with large databases. Over the last couple of years, those demands have evolved into giga, tera, and petabytes. This data no longer resides in just one location. With cloud computing, it is truly distributed.

• OpenStack cloud technology is getting very popular, but how should your business use it: By deploying an OpenStack distribution in your servers or data center, or by using it as a service from a service provider?

Databases

• It’s time to stop sniping at Oracle’s handling of MySQL. Far from declining over the past few years, the open-source database has actually improved under Oracle’s stewardship, according to Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev.

BSD

• NetBSD developers have finally managed to enable SMP support for modern ARM SoCs.

• Those following the source-changes mailing list closely may have noticed several evbarm kernels getting “options MULTIPROCESSOR” in the last few days. This is due to those configurations now running properly in SMP mode, thanks to work mostly done by Matt Thomas and Nick Hudson.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GnuPG 2.1 brings support for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), merging of secret keys is now supported, support for PGP-2 keys has been dropped for security reasons, create/signing key improvements, improvements to handling key server pools, a new format is used for locally storing public keys, card support has been updated, X.509 certificate creation has been improved, and there’s many other enhancements.

• The split between Save and Export that GIMP introduced in version 2.8 has been a matter of much controversy. It’s been over two years now, and people are still complaining on the gimp-users list.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• The Journal of Biological Chemistry, The Plant Cell, Journal of Lipid Research, and mBio are among the journals introducing the Lens viewing experience to readers this fall. First introduced by eLife in 2013, Lens is aimed at making reading scientific articles on-screen easier by making it possible to explore figures, figure descriptions, references, and more – without losing your place in the article text.

Open Hardware

• Smaller than a credit card, BITalino is a low-cost hardware and open source software toolkit, aligned with the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement. It enables anyone to create quirky and serious projects alike for wearable health tracking devices. The base kit includes sensors to measure your muscles, heart, nervous system, motion, and ambient light—and it includes a microcontroller, Bluetooth, power management module, and all the accessories needed to start working.

Programming

• Code School is a respected e-learning site for developers ranging from the beginner to the advanced level, and it now offers an iOS app that lets users watch more than 300 instructional videos on development tools. You can get the iOS app on iTunes, and it is shown in the screenshot above. According to the folks at Code School: “Code School is an online learning destination that helps more than one million existing and aspiring developers learn through entertaining content. Our iOS app gives the ability to view Code School’s videos for courses on topics like JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Ruby and Rails, Git, and iOS.”

• As a fast-growing cloud file-sharing software company, Box needs to deploy new versions of its software in a timely fashion, and that requires an efficient code-testing process. Box built an internal tool to meet its needs, and today it’s releasing the tool into the wild.

Leftovers

Security

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• With the Democrats suffering substantial losses in the 2014 midterm elections, it is likely that the advice from pundits and political journalists will be the same as it always is: Move to the right.

Censorship

• Lena Dunham, who apparently is famous for a HBO show I haven’t watched, has a memoir out. I don’t approve of 28-year-olds having memoirs unless and until they have been shot for advocating for the downtrodden or something, but Ms. Dunham is hardly the first to commit this minor sin.

• This weekend Ms. Dunham became very upset because some people — mostly on conservative political websites — described her memoir as a confession to sexually abusing her little sister.

• We’ve only written about Lena Dunham once before, and it was in the context of her threatening a lawsuit against Gawker for daring to publish her book proposal and comment on it, mocking Dunham. At the time, as noted, I’d never even heard of Dunham. I’ve still never seen her show, but I have seen/heard her interviewed a few times, and I don’t quite understand why there’s so much hate directed at her some of the time. She seems to have an interesting perspective on life and has turned it into a very successful TV show. Good for her. Still, this is now the second time we’ve felt the need to write about Dunham and, once again, it’s about an apparent legal threat from her, based on her book. This time it’s not about the book proposal, but the book itself, now that it’s out.

• Apparently, though, Roca Labs just keeps threatening people for covering the case. We’ve heard from a few others who received similar threats to the one we received, and the latest is Tracy Coenen, a fraud investigator who writes the Fraud Files blog, where she covered the Roca lawsuit, the lawsuit against a former customer and the fake implied endorsement from Alfonso Ribeiro.

Privacy

• Further evidence that the Regulatory of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is being used to violate the rights of UK citizens was exposed today. Documents released by human rights organisation, Reprieve show that GCHQ and MI5 staff were told they could target lawyers’ communications. This undermines legal privilege that ensures communications between lawyers and their clients are confidential.

• Writing in Tuesday’s Financial Times, the new director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan, called for “greater co-operation from technology companies” to stop terrorists and criminals groups using online services as their “command-and-control networks of choice”.

• In his first public statement since becoming Director of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan yesterday described the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple as, ‘the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals,’ and called on them to give ‘greater co-operation’ to the intelligence services. It is a surprising challenge to these companies, given how much GCHQ relies on them for our data.

• [...]

• The problem is that GCHQ and the NSA don’t want personal security to get in the way of them looking at our data: they want banks of computers to check on everyone to make sure you don’t pose a threat to them. That is what bulk collection and analysis means, though they daren’t spell it out that way. Instead, they talk of “needles” being separated from “innocent hay”.

• The day is rapidly approaching when every city in the U.S. will be like London is now, with surveillance cameras connected to a grid covering every cubic inch of the city, not dissimilar to what we see weekly on “Person of Interest”. Already, in London, computers connected to these cameras can detect “suspicious behavior”. Add facial recognition technology to that and it really will be like “Person of Interest”, especially in a nation that’s convinced that terrorists are hiding around every corner. The technology is sure to be abused, as law enforcement has never found a technology they didn’t overuse.

• And what has all this “demanding” and “doubling down” netted Comey? Nothing really. He still needs a compliant legislative body to oblige his fantasies of subservient tech companies opening wide for fat-fingered g-men.

• The director of the FBI on Monday doubled down on demands that Silicon Valley giants cooperate in the course of criminal investigations, saying that tech companies such as Apple and Google have to unlock cellphones, if authorities request it.

Civil Rights

• It appears Chicago wants to get in on New York City’s racket — steamrolling civil liberties because of a supposed terrorism nexus. For New York City, it’s been every day since Sept. 11th, 2001, greatly aided and abetted by a nanny statist mayor and a police commissioner who’d never seen a personal freedom he didn’t immediately dislike.

• Riders and a public transit expert expressed skepticism about a Chicago police plan to stop some rush-hour riders before they pass through rail station turnstiles to screen their bags for explosives.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• One of the points that we’ve made a few times concerning the whole net neutrality fight is that whatever rules are put in place, someone is going to sue. As we noted in that post, Verizon’s original filing on the net neutrality plan the FCC announced back in May (based on Section 706) suggested that Verizon would sue over those rules if they were put in place (in contrast to Comcast and AT&T who both said they’d be fine with rules under 706). Since then, it’s become clear that lots of other ISPs have made it clear to Verizon that it should shut up and sit tight, because its own lawsuit that kicked out the 2010 rules now seem likely to lead to much stricter laws.

• So it’s fairly amusing to see Verizon put out a blog post effectively now pleading for the May rules under 706 — rules that it didn’t initially support — now that it’s come out that the FCC is considering this new “hybrid plan.” Suddenly, according to Verizon, rules under 706 are unassailable and won’t lead to a lawsuit, while everything else will.

DRM

• One of the more interesting things unveiled at Apple’s most recent press event was the company’s AppleSIM, or universal SIM technology embedded in the iPad Air 2 that quickly allows users to switch carriers, presenting you with easy wireless broadband pricing for each carrier option. Of course, when Apple quietly announced this functionality, Verizon wasn’t listed as a supporter.

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