● 11.13.14

● Links 13/11/2014: Ubuntu MATE 14.04.1 LTS, New KDE Plasma

Posted in News Roundup at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Ubuntu 14.10 has been out for a couple of weeks now and I have been fighting to write a review for it due to the fact that for desktop users nothing much has changed since Ubuntu 14.04.

• I was half tempted to post a new article with the title “An Everyday Linux User Review Of 14.10″ with the content simply being a link to the “Everyday Linux User Review Of 14.04″ and a second link to the 14.10 release notes. Click here to see what I actually came up with.x

Desktop

• Lenovo and Asustek are expected to release Chromebooks using Google-certified solutions from China-based Rockchip in the first half of 2015 at the latest, and their devices are expected to be priced at US$149, a new low for notebook products, according to Digitimes Research’s latest finding from the Greater China supply chain.

• This development will be the final step in freeing many humans from Wintel.

Kernel Space

• Stephan Mueller has announced the first release of libkcapi, a user-space library for tapping the Linux kernel’s crypto API in an easy-to-use fashion.

• While Linus Torvalds was a bit unhappy about the continued flow of late changes for the Linux 3.18 kernel, with today’s 3.18-rc4 release he’s happy that the past week has indicated a slowdown in changes for Linux 3.18.

• Wacom recently added two interesting products to its lineup: the Intuos Creative Stylus 2 and the Bamboo Stylus Fineline. Both are styli only, without the accompanying physical tablet and they are marketed towards the Apple iPad market. The basic idea here is that touch location is provided by the system, the pen augments that with buttons, pressure and whatever else. The tips of the styli are 2.9mm (Creative Stylus 2) and 1.9mm (Bamboo Fineline), so definitely smaller than your average finger, and smaller than most other touch pens. This could of course be useful for any touch-capable Linux laptop, it’s a cheap way to get an artist’s tablet. The official compatibility lists the iPads only, but then that hasn’t stopped anyone in the past.

• Since a while containers have been one of the hot topics on Linux. Container managers such as libvirt-lxc, LXC or Docker are widely known and used these days. In this blog story I want to shed some light on systemd’s integration points with container managers, to allow seamless management of services across container boundaries.

Graphics Stack

• Tom Stellard has more improvements coming for AMD’s GPU LLVM back-end that can yield performance improvements.

• While AMD’s new GPU kernel driver isn’t coming for Linux 3.19, another pull request has been sent in for the current Radeon DRM driver and it offers up a few last minute enhancements.

• This week Intel updated its Linux Graphics Installer for Fedora 20 and Ubuntu 14.04, but as usual, it’s really nothing too special and doesn’t earn my high recommendation as there’s better ways for users to be running the latest open-source graphics code.

Benchmarks

• The latest weekend benchmarks up on Phoronix are comparing Fedora 21′s GCC and LLVM Clang code compilers to see what’s the fastest for an Intel Xeon E5-1680 v3 rig with sixteen threads.

Applications

• Pitivi is a free and open source video editor for the Linux platform that uses the GStreamer multimedia framework. Its developer has recently updated the application and he added a number of new features, besides all the fixes and regular changes.

• The eBook reader, editor, and library management software Calibre has finally reached version 2.9 bringing many new features to eBook Readers, major improvements and a new fix for Unity. Because it is a big app with support for many devices, lots of features and supports for a ton of libraries the developer pushes alot of fixes and improvements for the users.

• XnConvert is a free batch image processor that runs on multiple platforms and can process hundreds of different file types. It runs beautifully on Linux and provides a huge number of options.

• Thunar, the default Xfce file manager, doesn’t support split view. In a bug report from 2013 which requested this feature, Nick Schermer, one of the Thunar developers, said that Thunar won’t support split view because “Thunar is by design meant to be simple and easy to use”.

• The ownCloud 1.7.0 client introduces support for overlay icons that are supported by the popular file managers where ownCloud is used, selective sync is another added feature, and there’s been a huge amount of bug fixes and other improvements.

• Running off systemd’s new Linux software/packaging vision, Matthias Klumpp has proposed Limba, an experimental software installer that doesn’t depend upon Btrfs but rather technologies that have been mostly mainline for a while.

Proprietary

• The Opera developers have now released a new version of their browser in the 26.x branch, and this time it’s a Beta build.

Instructionals/Technical

• OpenGL is a well-known standard for generating 3-D as well as 2-D graphics that is extremely powerful and has many capabilities. OpenGL is defined and released by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB).

• This article is a gentle introduction to OpenGL that will help you understand drawing using OpenGL.

• The latest version of OpenGL at the time of this writing is 4.4, which uses a different technique for drawing from the one presented here. Nevertheless, the purpose of this article is to help you understand OpenGL philosophy, not teach you how to code using the latest OpenGL version. Therefore, the presented source code can be run on Linux machines that have an older OpenGL version installed.

Games

• Darksiders is being worked on for Linux, but sadly as we reported before there is still a bug holding it up.

• Grab your swords, as Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is looking like it’s getting close to a Linux release at last.

• The unique puzzle platformer where you guide an amorphous organism by nudging and manipulating it past obstacles is set to release early next year. They are determined to support Linux from day one and solidifies their promise by offering up an instantly available preview level for Linux for pre-orderers.

• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has its first DLC pack out named ‘Handsome Jack Doppelganger’ is now out, and thanks to Aspyr Media it has day-1 Linux support.

• Pillars of Eternity, the massive RPG to come from Obsidian Entertainment & Paradox Interactive is set to release early next year, and it’s now up for pre-order with Linux support.

• Elliot Quest, a 2D minimalist adventure title developed and published by Ansimuz Games, has arrived on Steam for Linux and all the other supported platforms.

• Rogue Legacy, a genealogical rogue 2D adventure title developed and published by Cellar Door Games, is available on Steam for Linux with a huge 80% discount.

• QbQbQb is a colourful and good-looking arcade game that was made entirely on Linux, and we have free keys for you!

• The fast-paced platformer has previously been released on the OUYA but made its cross-platform début on the PC today. It incorporates magnetism as a gameplay mechanic in an interesting way that makes it stand out.

• Unvanquished, a free, open source first-person shooter that combines real-time strategy elements with a futuristic and sci-fi setting, has been promoted to version Alpha 33 and the new iteration is now ready for testing.

• The Kickstarted game was released to backers three weeks ago and initial impressions are good. Initially the backer beta was exclusive to Windows, but was made available to Mac and Linux backers the week after, on 1st November.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Version 1.12 of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries was released bright and early this morning.

• After three months of development work we are proud to announce the release of version 1.12 of EFL, Elementary, Evas Generic Loaders and Emotion Generic Players.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This month the Plasma 5 team brings you 5.1.1, a bugfix release to polish up the offering. It includes all the latest translations and a bunch of bugfixes.

• Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.1.1. Plasma 5 was released in July with many feature refinements and streamlining the existing codebase of KDE’s popular desktop for developers to work on for the years to come.

• In case you didn’t hear, KDE is running a fundraiser which helps fund sprints and other expenses of your favorite desktop/applications/games brought to you by the KDE community. Plus there are cool konqi postcards!

• Sometimes you crunch some numbers on a particular metric and the result simply causes you to stare at your screen, slack-jawed, wondering “why did nobody notice this at the time?” Well… maybe someone did and I hadn’t noticed. Here is a deliberately vague plot. It is deliberately vague because I do not want to prejudice your thoughts about what we are looking at. Take a look…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If you have had your head in the sand today you might well have missed the story that the GNOME Foundation and Groupon are is a disagreement over the use of “GNOME”. I already shared my thoughts in Tweet form earlier… But now I’d like to talk a little more. Not about the event, but about how we (the Free Software community) reacted to it.

• Unless you’ve been living under a rock today you would have seen that Groupon™ have been trying to use a trademark that belongs to GNOME™. Today GNOME™ started raising money to fight a legal battle.

• I know there have been ongoing private discussions for months, and even though I have no idea what was said I do have full faith that if it got to the point of GNOME threatening to take legal action, it’s because they felt they needed to.

• It seems to have worked.

• Groupon has dropped trademark applications that sought to use the “Gnome” name for a point-of-sale tablet it released in May, clashing with the open-source software group of the same name.

• First things first: I’m not heavily invested in GNOME. In fact, once GNOME 3 came out and — gasp! — no icons on the desktop, I said “vaya con dios” and made skid marks racing to Xfce, KDE and Openbox (on the CrunchBang box) on various machines in the lab. The reason is a matter of personal taste. For the most part, I like icons on my desktop, not in a tray on the side, and I like what they do when I click on them — like, you know, open programs.

• The GNOME Foundation no sooner put out their cry for support when the offending party bowed out. Katherine Noyes explores 2015 as the year of Linux on the desktop. Jamie Watson tests a few distributions on his Acer Aspire E11 and LinuxBSDos.com reviews Pisi Linux 1.1.

• Thank you so much for your donations and help in spreading the word! We are overwhelmed and reinvigorated by the support we received from everyone, which has resulted in the following joint announcement that we’re publishing with Groupon:

• Groupon has given up its pursuit of the trademark “Gnome”, intended for its sales register tablet, after being chased off by the open-source GNOME project.

• There is a lesson learned here, now that Groupon has (only after public admonishing from GNOME Foundation) decided to do what GNOME Foundation asked them for from the start. Specifically, I’d like to point out how it’s all too common for for-profit companies to treat non-profit charities quite badly, even when the non-profit charity is involved in an endeavor that the for-profit company nominally “supports”.

• The conflict between The GNOME Foundation and Groupon erupted today when it was revealed that the GNOME trademark was being disputed by both parties. Now, it looks like Groupon is taking a step back and recognizing the impact of what it’s doing.

Distributions

• The best Linux distro for you may not be the best Linux distro for another user. Many Linux users are distro-hoppers, regularly moving from distribution to distribution. Some may be looking for the perfect distro, while others are simply curious about the latest Linux developments.

• The 4MLinux developer is managing the size of his distributions down to the last bit and he’s doing the same with the server edition. In fact, 4MLinux distros are well known for the fact that they are very small, regardless of their purpose. The Server edition follows the same cardinal rule and weighs just 192 MB, which is almost ridiculous.

• Clonezilla Live, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do bare metal backup and recovery, is now at version 2.3.1-9 and is ready for testing.

• Robolinux, a fast and easy to use Linux distribution based on Debian that uses both the GNOME and Xfce desktop environments, has been updated to version 7.7.1.

Reviews

• Pisi is a desktop Linux distribution forked from the old Pardus, a distribution that was developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), an arm of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK).

• The old Pardus was an original distribution. Original, because it, unlike most distributions, was not based on another distribution. Examples of original distributions are Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo and Arch Linux.

• Lubuntu’s Trusty Tahr LTS release actually put me off because of the Wifi bug and using nm-applet I found a workaround. My expectation was higher from the LTS release honestly. So, I started evaluating the Lubuntu’s latest release, 14.10, with almost zero expectation and I was pleasantly surprised. The release note states that this release is kind of calm before the storm.

• Point Linux, a GNU/Linux distribution that is based on Debian GNU/Linux and uses the MATE desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 3.0 Beta 2 and is now ready for download and testing.

New Releases

• The Chakra team is happy to announce the second release of the Chakra Euler series, which follows the KDE Applications and Platform 4.14 releases.

• Tanglu, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian that aims to be friendly and to cater a large user base, has been upgraded to version 2.0 Beta 2 and is now available for download and testing.

• OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi media player solution and to work on most devices, has been updated yet again in the course of just one week.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• While OS X has switched to LLVM’s Clang as the default C/C++ compiler and FreeBSD and other BSD distributions have followed in switching to Clang instead of GCC due to its more permissive license, OpenMandriva Lx is one of the first notable Linux distributions set to switch to Clang by default with its next release.

• Mageia, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, has been upgraded to version 5 Beta 1 and is ready for download.

• While Mageia 5 has been in an alpha state going back several months during the summer, the beta release of this Mandriva-derived distribution has finally materialized… one and a half months later than was originally anticipated.

• Many headlines today featured news that Microsoft will open source .NET and Swapnil Bhartiya discusses what this means for Linux. Bruce Byfield helps folks decide which of the nine best Linux distributions is for them and Debian 8 seems to be rolling right along. And finally today is a couple of reviews.

• Well, it’s been a long road, longer than we anticipated, but we’re almost there! Mageia 5 Beta 1 is now validated!

Ballnux/SUSE

• OpenSUSE 13.2 was released a week ago. As with the recent Fedora update, the latest release of openSUSE took a year to develop instead of the standard six months as the organization retooled its development practices.

• SUSE Linux has now been around for over 20 years, and it’s still going strong. As usual, the latest release serves as a foundation for developing Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise and brings some significant new improvements. So let’s dive right in!

• As the first major Linux distribution to have Btrfs as the default file system, what can users and developers expect from openSUSE 13.2?

Red Hat Family

• For those currently bound to the RHEL6 series rather than the newer RHEL7 series and use Scientific Linux to avoid the associated Red Hat costs, Scientific Linux 6.6 is now available.

• From a hybrid cloud standpoint both Cisco and RedHat share a common view that the world is going to be hybrid and open. Cisco has an initiative called Inter-Cloud and Red Hat is one of the crucial partners in making that happen from the software standpoint. What Cisco is providing is a network of cloud service providers who can operate with the Red Hat software underneath.

• This has been a significant week for Red Hat and for container technologies. FIrst, Red Hat announced OpenShift Enterprise 2.2 and advanced its xPaaS with a new private integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) offering. Now, as enterprises are increasingly focused on container technology, Red Hat has announced a beta release of its Linux container platform called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.

• Red Hat lifted the lid off of its “Project Atomic” back in April at the Red Hat Summit, saying it was trying to slim down its Linux OS and optimize it to run Docker containerized apps. Atomic Host appears to be the result of those efforts – it’s a lightweight OS environment that’s tuned to run DevOps and deployment tools, container management, orchestration and hosted application services for messaging and integration. It’s based on Google’s Kubernetes project for container host infrastructure, and can be deployed either on a physical server or on top of a virtual machine. To make things run smoothly, Red Hat is also throwing in SELinux support.

• If you wanted yet another way to describe what’s happening to telecoms with the development of NFV/SDN, you could do worse than think of it as two technical worlds colliding, hopefully with a happy and energetic outcome.

• Specifically Designed to Run Containers Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host Beta provides a streamlined host platform that is optimized to run application containers. The software components included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host Beta, as well as the default system tunings, have been designed to enhance the performance, scalability and security of containers, giving you the optimal platform on which to deploy and run application containers.

Fedora

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 was released the 14th of October, 2014, eleven months since the release of 6.5 in November 2013. So lets use this opportunity to take a quick look back over the vulnerabilities and security updates made in that time, specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server.

Debian Family

• There’s a lot of discussion / moaning /arguing at this time, so I thought I’d post something about how LAVA got into Debian Jessie, the work involved and the lessons I’ve learnt. Hopefully, it will help someone avoid the disappointment of having their package missing the migration into a future stable release. This was going to be a talk at the Minidebconf-uk in Cambridge but I decided to put this out as a permanent blog entry in the hope that it will be a useful reference for the future, not just Jessie.

• Last friday saw a somewhat distressing email to the debian-devel mailinglist, wherein Joey Hess, one of Debian’s most valuable contributors, announced his decision to quit the project.

• For all of Joey’s contributions over the years, this is an unwelcome message; I’d much rather have seen him remain active in Debian, both on a personal and a technical level. As it is, I have a feeling of not just losing a colleague in Debian, but also a friend.

• It’s finally become properly autumnal, in the real world and in Debian. One week ago, I announced (on behalf of the whole release team) that Debian 8 “Jessie” had successfully frozen on time.

• Lucas Nussbaum, the Debian Project Leader, is pushing to try to have Debian 8.0 “Jessie” ready for release within the next twelve weeks.

• Codenames of the Debian releases, so far: Debian 1.2 “Rex”, Debian 1.3 “Bo”, Debian 2.0 “Hamm”, Debian 2.1 “Slink”, Debian 2.2 “Potato”, Debian 3.0 “Woody”, Debian 3.1 “Sarge”, Debian 4.0 “Etch”, Debian 5.0 “Lenny”, Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” and Debian 8.0 “Jessie”.

• The right to communicate with your friends and family in private, without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal democracy. But this right is under serious attack these days.

• Debian is a making-the-world-better project, a caring for people project, a freedom-spreading project. Free Software is our tool.

Derivatives

• Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0r0, a live and installation DVD based on the stable packages from the Debian project and that’s using GNOME as the desktop, has been officially released.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Now, the developers have released Ubuntu Mate 14.04.1 using Ubuntu 14.04.1 as code base, as the name suggests. They have taken this decision due to the fact that Ubuntu 14.04 is a LTS (long term supported) release and some users prefer to keep LTS versions until the next long term supported system gets released. And Ubuntu Mate 14.04.1 will reach EOL in 2019.

• Discussed today during the first day of the Ubuntu 15.04 Online Developers’ Summit was about finally migrating over to BlueZ 5 for its Bluetooth stack. BlueZ 5 was originally released at the end of 2012 but still hasn’t shipped by default in Ubuntu Linux.

• BlueZ features support for new protocols, API improvements, new Bluetooth Low-Energy profiles, D-Bus interaction improvements, a new btmon Bluetooth monitoring tool, a bluetoothctl command line tool for interacting with BlueZ, and tons of other changes. BlueZ 5 was a huge release and it’s still been improved since with support for new profiles, Android improvements, and much more.

Flavours and Variants

• Because Ubuntu MATE 14.10 was the first Ubuntu MATE release and it’s supported for only 9 months, the Ubuntu MATE team released Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS yesterday, which is supported until 2019.

• A longer term release version has been made available for Ubuntu MATE, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that’s using the MATE desktop environment.

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced that the Raspberry Pi Model A+ is now available for purchase, with a new low price of $20 (€16).

• Let’s turn Raspberry Pi into an analogic/digital measurment tool with BitScope Micro, the most recent product of the BitScope tools generation. As hinted by the name, its calling is the measurement of digital signals. The software is available for the GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac/OS X platforms.

• Ingenic’s tiny “Newton2″ wearables module is smaller and more power efficient than the original, and runs Linux or Android on a MIPS-based Ingenic M200 SoC.

• Easy-to-Use Development Solutions Enable Quick and Cost-Effective Jump Start of Embedded Linux Based Application Development on Popular RZ/A Processor-Based Development Kits

Phones

Tizen

• Apple is like a printing press, and Samsung wants that. That’s why Samsung created Tizen. Because it wants an iOS-like platform it can control. It’s why Samsung has created innovation centers in Silicon Valley and New York City to incubate startups that might create Samsung-specific products.

Android

• An Android user on Reddit recently took the bold step of reviewing the iPad Air 2 on the Apple subreddit. It’s always interesting to see what dedicated users of one mobile platform think of the other once they dig in and get a chance to use it in a hands-on way. The reviewer was careful to offer numerous pros and cons about the iPad Air 2.

• Apple is finally fixing a problem that caused text messages to stop reaching users who switched from iOS to Android or other mobile platforms.

• The problem, which first began to affect users in 2011, prevents texts sent to some former iOS users from reaching their recipients. The issue happens when a user does not de-register their phone number from Apple’s iMessage before moving their SIM card to an Android or other non-iOS device. When an iMessage user sends a message to the number, the message is routed through iMessage instead of SMS, effectively remaining stuck on a service that the recipient can’t access any more.

• As we inch closer towards the inevitable roll out of Android 5.0 Lollipop from manufacturers across the Android ecosystem, Google and other developers have been slowly updating their apps per Google’s new Material Design guidelines. This past summer at Google IO when Android Wear was launched along side Material Design, it was a little saddening that the Android Wear companion application didn’t launch with Google’s new eye candy. Now months later, the latest app from Google’s suite to take upon the new design language just so happens to be the Android Wear app and as all things #materiyolo, we’re a fan.

• The latest release of BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth stack, is now available and adds support for a number of new features.

• The Android platform continues to enjoy significant advantages over that offered by Apple, and this is why it remains the platform of choice for business, BYOD, and power users.

• Unless you’ve already got your hands on Google’s latest flagship Nexus 6 or Nexus 9 devices, you probably haven’t yet got a taste of Android 5.0 Lollipop. If you’ve got an unlocked second-gen Moto G though, you can be among the first to try the newest version of Android with an over-the-air update.

• Apple will soon face a federal lawsuit brought on by a woman named Adrienne Moore, who, like many former iPhone users who have switched to Android, is upset that she did not receive text messages after switching platforms. She is seeking unspecified damages, and to make the lawsuit a class action.

• With Android 5.0 Lollipop showing up on the Moto X, being announced for the LG G3, and of course Google’s latest round of Nexus devices hitting the Play Store, Android fans have been wondering when the latest sweet treat from Google will hit their wrist computer. Yesterday, we showed you the first part of that update with Material Design changes and features coming to the Android Wear companion app. Today, we’re going to show you the second part of our two part feature: this is an exclusive look into some of the new features coming to the Android Wear 5.0 Lollipop update.

• Android updates don’t matter anymore—or at least that’s what many people think. Back-to-back-to-back Jelly Bean releases and a KitKat release seemed to only polish what already existed. When Google took the wraps off of “Android L” at Google I/O, though, it was clear that this release was different.

• Users of Nexus devices must have been left disappointed after Google pulled back Android 5.0 Lollipop update for its devices following reports of the Nexus 5 battery draining out when Wi-Fi was activated. The new software update is said to be ready again for Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10 after it was delayed by a few days.

• The battle in the mobile marketplace is not limited to manufacturers of devices. Perhaps the biggest dichotomy is between Android devices and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s proprietary iOS operating system. The format is used by many different mobile devices, and is of course developed byGoogle Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG), while Apple’s iOS system will never have the reach of Android, given that Apple retains exclusivity for its iPhone range.

• Google launched its latest mobile operating system, Android 5.0 Lollipop, alongside the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 this month.

Free Software/Open Source

• The acceleration of cloud computing as a model for modern IT infrastructure is causing massive transformation in data centers today. The largest data centers in the world run by Google, Amazon and others are super-efficient, automated, dynamically scalable and operate on seamless virtualized platforms often running on open source systems.

• Open source software developer Sourcefabric has signed Australian Associated Press to help develop an end-to-end news creation, production, curation, distribution and publishing platform.

• The two parties are inviting other news publishers to participate in the project, called Superdesk.

• AAP editor-in-chief Tony Gillies said, “Over the past 10 years, our existing editorial platform has proven increasingly inflexible.”

• “The time is right for some true innovation in this area and we believe that Sourcefabric will set us on the right path.”

• Sava Tatić, Sourcefabric managing director, said he was thrilled to be partnering with Australia’s national news agency.

• This is a report from the All Things Open conference, held this year at the Raleigh Convention Center. I attended Steven Vaughan-Nichols session on marketing and using the press in open source—this is a recap.

• Before Steven was a journalist, he was a techie. This makes him unusual: a journalist who actually gets technology. Steven is here to tell us that marketing is a big part of your job if you want a successful open source company. He has heard a lot of people saying that marketing isn’t necessary anymore. The reason it’s necessary is because writing great code is not enough—if no one else knows about it, it doesn’t matter. You need to talk with people about the project to make it a success.

• Route planning is an essential part of the connected and mobile world. Many people use commercial solutions on a daily basis to avoid traffic jams when heading home or when they plan their next business or outdoor trip. It is also a crucial part in many business areas like for garbage collection, pizza delivery, or ride sharing where speed is important to calculate thousands or even millions of high quality routes within a short time.

Events

• 6 years ago, the FUEL community (Frequently Used Entries in Localization) formed around the mission of standardization of commonly used terms in software localization. As it grew both vertically and horizontally by adding more languages and more modules respectively, the group realized the need for getting people who have an interest in language engineering under one roof. This gave birth to the FUEL GILT conference, the first in September 2013. The conference attracted many like minded-people from the industry and helped grow both FUEL and Indic Language Computing.

• This week, the FUEL project will hold the 2nd annual FUEL GILT Conference on November 14 and 15, 2014 in Pune, India.

Web Browsers

• Midori, a lightweight web browser that features full integration with GTK+ and fast rendering with WebKit, is now at version 0.5.9 and it should arrive in all the major repositories pretty soon.

Chrome

• The stable branch of the Google Chrome Internet browser has been upgraded to version 38.0.2125.122 and comes with an important update for Adobe Flash and numerous other changes and improvements.

Mozilla

• Roughly 10 years to the day after the release of Firefox 1.0, Mozilla on Monday announced an updated version of its open source browser complete with a new Forget button aimed at protecting users’ privacy.

• “Forget gives you an easy way to tell Firefox to clear out some of your recent activity,” explained Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale. “Instead of asking a lot of complex technical questions, Forget asks you only one: How much do you want to forget? Once you tell Firefox you want to forget the last five minutes, or two hours, or 24 hours, it takes care of the rest.”

• The celebratory Firefox release that puts the users more in control of how they browse

• Ten years after the first Firefox 1.0 release, Mozilla emphasizes its core strengths of privacy and developer focus.

• For some time now, Mozilla has been focused on making virtual reality come alive in browsing experiences. In June, the company delivered builds of Firefox that supported the Oculus Rift device and platform, and now the company has delivered a new site that demonstrates the virtual reality promise of the Web.

• Mozilla has announced that Firefox 33.0.3 has been officially released and is now available for download. It’s just a maintenance version, but users should still upgrade.

• A couple of months ago, I wrote about the tremendous potential for Mozilla to change the world by putting smartphone capabilities in the hands of hundreds of millions of people with its Firefox OS. That’s an example of the project moving its focus away from the traditional desktop to a sector that is likely to become the dominant one in the next few years.

SaaS/Big Data

• Here’s a question for the OpenStack cloud platform: is it software built for a select few or is it built to meet the needs of everyone?

• In a video interview, Jonathan Bryce, executive director, and Mark Collier, Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation, discuss how OpenStack is evolving to meet multiple layers of needs.

• Using Docker containers to deploy virtual applications might be a good idea, but how can an enterprise actually monitor what’s going on? GroundWork believes its BoxSpy project is up to the task.

• Want to get more done with OpenStack? We’ve got you covered.

• We’ve put together some of the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips published over the past month into this handy collection. And if you need more help, the official documentation for OpenStack is always a great place to turn.

Databases

• EnterpriseDB says a tool unveiled today that connects Postgres and MySQL databases strengthens the position of Postgres as an alternative standard database.

• The MySQL foreign data wrapper allows remote data from Oracle’s open-source database to be defined as a table in Postgres, so firms can run SQL queries across it along with local Postgres tables as if they were all local.

• “If I were starting something new today that was software as a business, I would make it either open source or SaaS or freemium,” he said. “I would definitely not make it closed source if I’m starting from day one, ’cause I don’t think it works anymore. I think you’re going to have competition. There’s going to be stuff out there. It’s going to be tough. If you’re starting today, it’s sort of what are people doing five years from now would be the question.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Michael Meeks has shared that LibreOffice 4.4 will feature some dramatic OpenGL improvements.

BSD

• In a discussion about porting the modern Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver to FreeBSD, it was brought up that a FreeBSD developer is looking at the possibility of introducing a Linux kernel API wrapper to help in porting Linux drivers to FreeBSD.

• OpenBSD’s latest feature is support for USB 3.0.

• For those using OpenBSD, as of last week USB 3.0 support was committed to the operating system. When enabling XHCI for OpenBSD, most USB 3.0 features are working but isochronous transfers go unsupported for now.

• The good news is that I can run X in OpenBSD 5.6 on my AMD A4 APU-equipped HP Pavilion g6 laptop. Before now, starting X would cause a kernel panic.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Copyleft.org is intended as a project to promote copyleft licensing, especially the GPL. There’s guides, information on the licenses, and analysis of such licenses. There’s also a mailing list, IRC channel, and other resources for those wishing to learn more about these friendly licenses.

Public Services/Government

• Earlier this year Computer Weekly reported news of the MoD’s £2m in sponsorship for a competition to find innovative ways of automating cyber defences.

• The government has been involved with open source software since before the Internet — but it is only recently that government use of open source really has come into vogue, observed GitHub’s Ben Balter. “A big reason for this is that open source used to be inaccessible to outsiders and didn’t have the quality and support large organizations like government have come to expect.”

• The open source community in Indonesia is still small and this has discouraged the Indonesian tax agency from moving some big systems to open source, its Transformation and ICT Director told FutureGov.

• Open source is usually used by universities in Indonesia, he said, and the source code is not published so “it’s in a small group”, said Harry Gumelar.

• “Our difficulty right now is that we don’t know who to contact if we have a problem,” he added. The tax agency has asked for help in the past, but not received any response from the community.

• Indian government software applications are set to make the shift to open source, potentially boosting the pace at which such programmes are developed, and leading to millions of dollars in savings by moving away from proprietary systems.

Licensing

• Open source license management provider Protecode has put together a simple overview (and accompanying infographic) on choosing the best open source license for a project.

• [...]

• The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a copyleft software license, which guarantees end users the freedoms to use, study, share (copy), and modify the software as long as they track changes/dates of in source files and release their code and any modifications under GPL. They can distribute their application using a GPL commercially, but they must open-source it under the same GPL license.

Openness/Sharing

• Anaplan has always been focused on changing the way financial planners do their work, moving it from Excel spreadsheets to a cloud service. Today, the company announced Anaplan App Hub, an online store/community for sharing financial planning apps.

• At the core of the open source spirit, there is a conviction that knowledge and skill development ought to be at the reach of everybody. We are driven by a radical spirit of inclusion and embracement of everyone’s abilities. We refuse to exclude others from access to information, knowledge, tools—and above everything, from the enjoyment of experiencing and building things together in a community.

Open Hardware

• Just one month after the Open Hardware Summit in Rome, all the videos are now available for you to see.

• The world of open source collaboration is continuing to produce a stream of new ideas, all of which will continue to be improved upon, some of them useable now and some of more akin to the high fashion seen on the runway at Paris fashion week that looks great but isn’t really for everyday wear. One interesting contribution to this perpetual innovation machine is the TeeBotMax, a foldable 3D printer made available by Instructables user tutuemma.

• The Kiwi makers of a low-cost 3-D printer and a website that helps people make Official Information Act requests won gongs at the Open Source awards in Wellington.

• Auckland companies Diamond Age and Mindkits won the business award for their work creating the DiamondMind 3-D printer.

Programming

• Thank you all for having me. I’m Kyle Simpson, known as “getify” online on Twitter, GitHub, and all the other places that matter. I was here in Rochester teaching a workshop for the Thought @ Work conference this past weekend, and figured I’d stick around to check out some JavaScript (JS) and Node classes here in the New Media Interactive Development program, so thank you for having me.

Leftovers

Science

• Frank Swain has been going deaf since his 20s. Now he has hacked his hearing so he can listen in to the data that surrounds us

Health/Nutrition

Security

• A flaw in the way apps are identified could allow hackers to infiltrate 95 percent of iOS devices, according to FireEye

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, said at the cel­eb­ra­tion of the fall of the Ber­lin Wall last week­end that we are facing a new Cold War. What are the geo­pol­it­ical real­it­ies behind this statement?

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Ever since he became a US Senator in 1994, Jim Inhofe has been among the most prominent climate-change sceptics in Washington. The Oklahoma Republican, who turns 80 next week, once compared the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Gestapo.

• Now, the man who also compared the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to “a Soviet-style trial, in which ideological purity trumps technical and scientific rigour”, is in line for one of the most important environmental jobs in Congress.

• Or it would be, at least, were it not for the enormous amounts of subsidies bestowed on the industry by G-20 nations, which seem to be reneging on their 2009 pledge to phase out inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies. According to a new report from the Overseas Development Institute, G-20 nations spend $88 billion per year supporting oil exploration. That’s twice the amount the industry itself spends, and, according to the report, almost twice what the International Energy Agency estimates we’ll need to meet heat and electricity demand by 2030. And it definitely contradicts the IEA’s contention that, if we’re to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, two-thirds of our remaining fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground.

• US, UK, Australia giving tax breaks to explore new reserves despite climate advice that fossil fuels should be left buried

• Officials in France are racking their brains about how to deal with a dead whale washed up on a beach on the south coast of France. The decaying carcass is a ticking time bomb, with the possibility it could explode.

Finance

• Immigrants from the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004 contributed more to the UK than they took out in benefits, according to a new study.

• June 20, 2014 marked World Refugee Day, the first World Refugee Day during which global forced displacement was the highest since World War II. The Global Trends report, compiled by the UNHCR(United Nations High Commission for Refugees), established the figure of 51.2 million globally displaced people at the end of 2013, an increase of six million from the 45.2 million at the end of 2012.

• “Deadly Environment,” a report by the non-governmental organization Global Witness. revealed that from 2002 to 2013 at least 908 people were killed globally due to their environmental advocacy, with the rate of murder doubling in the last four years. Latin America and the Asia-Pacific show the highest rates of violence as tensions over limited natural resources in these regions escalate. Will Potter writes for Foreign Policy that, today, “Brazil remains overwhelmingly more dangerous for environmentalists than other countries.” Twice as many environmentalists were killed in Brazil as in any other country. However, this problem is just part of the global trend that reveals an increasing number of such deaths.

• Hype went wild coming into last week’s 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Freedom” had been achieved. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), or what Western media preferred to call communist East Germany, had been rejected. Its hated official spying on its people – the massive “Stasi” apparatus – could not continue. Liberty and prosperity would and did arrive as the country rejoined the “free world.” The people had peacefully overthrown actually existing socialism and returned to capitalism. No one could miss that (officially hyped) interpretation of the fall of the Wall. Yet it is hardly the only one, although that was rarely admitted.

Censorship

• Earlier this year, appeals court panel sided with woman who appeared in Innocence of Muslims and ordered Google to take down video which sparked widespread protests

Privacy

• FACEBOOK MESSENGER has hit the 500 million monthly user milestone after the social network forced users to download the app.

• The figure is more than double the 200 million the firm claimed in April, but doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

• The social network made it mandatory in July for iOS and Android users to download Facebook Messenger in order to use it, removing the chat functionality from the main Facebook app.

• The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read, because it demonstrates exactly what lengths the intelligence community is willing to go to—and what happens when they take the fruits of the surveillance they’ve done and unleash it on a target.

• The anonymous letter was the result of the FBI’s comprehensive surveillance and harassment strategy against Dr. King, which included bugging his hotel rooms, photographic surveillance, and physical observation of King’s movements by FBI agents. The agency also attempted to break up his marriage by sending selectively edited “personal moments he shared with friends and women” to his wife.

• We’re pleased to see Sen. Harry Reid move toward a final vote on the Senate version of the USA FREEDOM Act, S. 2685. EFF has consistently urged the Senate to move forward on the bipartisan bill since it was first introduced in July.

Civil Rights

• The boyfriend of the 40-year-old Ann Arbor woman who was shot and killed by police Sunday night said he doesn’t understand why police had to use lethal force to take down the woman who had a knife in her hand as she confronted officers.

• Brazilian police killed more than 11,000 people between 2009 and 2013 for an average of six killings a day, a public safety NGO said Tuesday.

• The study by the Sao Paulo-based Brazilian Forum on Public Safety said police nationwide killed 11,197 people over the past five years, while law enforcement agents in the United States killed 11,090 people over the past 30 years.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• For his first battle against a Republican-controlled Congress, President Obama has chosen the Internet.

• Obama on Monday released an unusual video statement urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enact the toughest possible rules on Internet service providers, thrilling liberal activists who have long pushed him to take a firmer stand on net neutrality.

• Well, we already wrote about President Obama’s somewhat surprising decision to come out strongly in favor of Title II reclassification for broadband (with strong forbearance) to setup some real net neutrality rules. We also covered the unhappy response from the big broadband players who are just repeating the same talking points from the past year, claiming that they’ll suddenly stop investing in broadband and how this will kill the internet (ignoring that they already rely on Title II for a number of things, including internet infrastructure).

• US PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA has come out in favour of reclassifying the internet as a public utility.

• The president has stayed fairly quiet on the matter since the Open Internet Order that made up part of his election pledges was shot down in a courtroom battle with Verizon at the start of the year.

• But in a statement on Monday he said: “I’m asking the Federal Communications Commission [FCC] to reclassify internet services under Title II of a law known as the Telecommunications Act.

• If you’ve been reading these parts for even a little while, you’re sure to have come across one of my many Net neutrality discussions. As tiresome as it has been to pound on the same podium over and over, it has been necessary — and President Obama’s very public statement asking that Internet service providers be classified under Title II is a major step in the fight for an open Internet.

• [...]

• Of course, that didn’t stop Sen. Ted Cruz from coming out with a pants-on-head stupid comment about Net neutrality being “Obamacare for the Internet.” Making a statement that amazingly dumb in public would probably have found him signed up for forced sterilization in the 1950s. It’s this kind of blatant, arrogant, willful ignorance that undermines our democracy. But enough about the dim, let’s look at the future.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The problems of TTIP are so many – total lack of meaningful transparency, the unnecessary inclusion of an ISDS chapter, the threat to Europe’s high standards governing health, safety, the environment, labour etc. – that the agreement’s supporters have been forced to fight back with the only thing they claim to offer: money. TTIP, they argue in multiple ways, will take us to the land of milk and honey, boost the GDP massively, and lead to lots of extra dosh for every family in the EU.

Copyrights

• Kim Dotcom is looking for a new legal team in New Zealand after a high-profile lawfirm withdrew its services. However, what’s especially unusual is that Simpson Grierson has not only pulled out, but is also removing all references to Dotcom and Mega from its corporate site.

• Almost three-quarters of Australians believe that using technical measures to end Internet piracy are doomed to fail and will only lead to higher ISP bills for consumers. Those are just two of the findings of a new survey carried out by the Communications Alliance, the industry body for the Australian telecoms industry.

• Atlanta-based Internet provider CBeyond is protesting a DMCA subpoena from the anti-piracy monitoring outfit Rightscorp. The ISP is refusing to hand over the identities behind more than a thousand IP-addresses connected to copyright infringement while declaring Rightscorp’s efforts as a frivolous fishing expedition.

• Several major movie studios and record labels have filed a lawsuit against the Swedish ISP B2, demanding that the company blocks access to The Pirate Bay. The lawsuit, which also calls for a blockade of the streaming site Swefilmer, is the first of its kind in The Pirate Bay’s home country.

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