● 11.21.14

● Links 21/11/2014: Problems at Debian, Jolla Tablet

Posted in News Roundup at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• To maintain an application infrastructure that meets continually expanding business demands, organizations need more than a maintenance and support contract. Organizations need a proven, scalable, reliable, and secure enterprise platform.

• This week’s news is a tale of two stories.

• During the week Groupon tried to take the name from under the toadstool of the GNOME desktop and Microsoft became Linux friendly.

• Groupon provides low price coupons and deals for goods and services such as meals at restaurants, haircuts, hotel stays and spa days.

• Lately, we hear a lot about Linux — how it’s dominating on servers, how it makes up a large chunk of the smartphone market, and how it’s becoming a highly viable option on the desktop. But Linux didn’t appear out of thin air; before the creation of Linux, and before the rise of Windows, the computing world was dominated by Unix. And for those who don’t know, Linux is very similar to Unix. Since we’ve already looked at the differences between Linux and Windows, what exactly is the difference between Linux and Unix?

Desktop

• That free software refers to the fact that you have the liberty to change the laptop’s operating system. The Librem 15′s OS is based on the GNU operating system, which, with the relevant know-how, you can modify the code of to make it work however you want. Clearly, this notebook is for the tinker/programming enthusiast who wants a lot of control over the way their computers work.

• We don’t normally cover crowdfunding campaigns on PCWorld, but sometimes one comes along that’s just begging for a deeper look. The Purism Librem 15 notebook is one of those.

• Purism, which launched a drive on Crowd Supply on Wednesday, is seeking at least $250,000 to make a high-end Linux laptop that only runs free, or open-source, software. This means no annoying closed-source drivers—or “binary blobs”—necessary to make the hardware work. Make no mistake—this is a serious, slick Linux notebook, not a bit of kit for hobbyist hackers.

• OpenLMI is designed to support this. The LMI CLI is task oriented, simple, and easy to use. All you really need to use the LMI CLI is “LMI help”. The LMIShell scripts are designed to do useful work, to be easy to read, and to be modified for specific tasks.

Server

• Today we did shutdown our now oldest running Gentoo Linux production server : ns2.

• Obviously this machine was happily spreading our DNS records around the world but what’s remarkable about it is that it has been doing so for 2717 straight days !

• The Tianhe-2 supercomputer has retained its crown as the world’s most powerful system for the fourth consecutive time in the Top500 supercomputing rankings.

• Once more the best of the best supercomputer experts came together to decide which are the fastest of the fast computers. Number one with a bullet continues to be Tianhe-2, aka Milky Way-2, a Chinese supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology. Its operating system? Linux of course.

• I have written that Linux VDI is a niche of a niche, and while that is still 100% true, there are reasons that we’re starting to see Linux get more attention in the desktop virtualization conversation.

• The first reason is that customers are asking for Linux VDI.

• In November 2014, the top six supercomputers all run Linux, but that’s about the only thing they have in common.

• He started working on Docker in 2008 in his mother’s Paris basement, as a tiny side thing that he thought only a handful of other people would ever care about.

• SDN vendor PLUMgrid first emerged from stealth mode in June of 2013, offering the promise of a new overlay model for Software Defined Networking. In June of this year, PLUMgrid debuted its OpenStack Networking Suite. Now, in November, the company is updating that suite to version 2.0.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Now, Lynch and Scherschel — Dan and Fab to their relatives, friends, and a wide listener base — are at the crossroads. Recently, with the episodes well into the 360s in number, they decided to finish out the year with Linux Outlaws and ride off into the sunset.

Kernel Space

• It may interest some of you to know that we in Fedora Infrastructure use Linux Software Raid (mdraid) on all our servers local disks.

• We’ve focused a lot of attention in recent years on making Linux learning materials more accessible to more people. This year, for example, together with our partner edX, we were able to offer our Intro to Linux course for free to nearly 300,000 people from all over the world. While the United States ranks first in the number of students taking Intro to Linux, it only represents about 30 percent of all class participants. The top geographies include the U.S., India, United Kingdom, Brazil and Spain. Linux attracted more people with this one course than the number of people who attended all seven games of the recent World Series combined.

• How much demand is there for Linux training? Enough to make the Linux Foundation’s inaugural MOOC online training course, “Introduction to Linux,” the most popular offering on the edX platform. So the open source advocacy group has pointed out in a memo that reveals much about the present and future of open source education.

• Some folks say that systemd is the svchost.exe of Linux, saying it is essentially making Linux more like Microsoft Windows. It is a monolithic entity that hides what’s happening behind the scenes. It stomps on the Unix Philosophy (again) of doing one thing and doing it well. With systemd we have one large Swiss army knife of a tool that isn’t very good at anything in particular.

• Cars may still not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Linux and open source, but the Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project continues to expand. This week, it announced three new members, bringing the total number of industry partners and academic collaborators to 46.

Graphics Stack

• While I generally don’t recommend Nouveau for Linux gaming systems due to the re-clocking still being a huge work-in-progress to allow the graphics cards to effectively operate at their designated clock frequencies / performance states, I decided to run some fresh tests using the Linux 3.18 kernel and Mesa 10.4-devel to see where things stand today. For the tested Kepler graphics cards that support re-clocking, I tested them at their maximum obtained re-clocked frequencies where the system was stable — generally still below their rated core/memory frequencies.

• Just one week after the bulk of the Radeon DRM changes for Linux 3.19, another round of updates were submitted for DRM-Next.

Benchmarks

• So, in nutshell, I found Lubuntu 14.10 to be the best in performance among the Ubuntu distros. It offered me trouble free experience throughout my usage and I found it to be really stable. Anyone looking for a really really efficient distro and those with low powered machines can safely bet on Lubuntu 14.10

• Based on my experience, I found Ubuntu GNOME to be the second best offering very decent performance with a very refined desktop environment. I thought Xubuntu would occupy this position but unfortunately, a bit of instability in the distro marred my experience. I would safely recommend Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 to users with modern laptop with or without touchscreen over the rest of the four distros.

• As usual Kubuntu is the slowest of the lot and consumes the most power. You can expect the least battery life from Kubuntu. However, the desktop environment (specially the Plasma 5 upgrade) is mind blowing! Those with powerful modern machines and less usage of battery power can safely choose Kubuntu as it seemed to be the most exciting of the lot.

Applications

• jEdit is a feature-complete editor with countless programming features, including syntax highlighting, indentation, edit modes for tens of languages. jEdit is written in Java so you will need to have OpenJDK installed.

• Quick update for Ubuntu users: FFmpeg isn’t available in recent Ubuntu releases but that will change with Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet (currently under development, to be released in May, 2015).

• Popcorn Time, an application that allows users to stream movies and TV shows directly from torrents without having to download them, has reached version 0.3.5 and is now available for download.

• Gis Weather is a highly customizable weather widget which supports Gismeteo, Weather and AccuWeather, available for Linux and Windows. The app ships with optional Ubuntu AppIndicator / tray icon which displays the current weather.

• Dooscape is a web browser written in Qt which features a simple and clean interface and is based on the QtWebKit engine. Dooscape has some neat features and takes a different approach compared to traditional web browsers.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Geometry Wars 3 is an arcade shooter with modes for single-player, multi-player and co-op. The action in Geometry Wars takes place on geometrical-shaped grids, where you control a ship and need to survive the hordes of enemies.

• FLARE is a really beautiful free and open-source 2D role-playing game which allows you to choose from various classes, each with their own strengths, buy new weapons and fight hordes of enemies in a fantasy world.

• In TinyKeep players will embrace the role of a hopeless prisoner held deep in a forgotten dungeon who one day wakes up to find themselves mysteriously released.

• The Linux version landed yesterday, and we have been able to give it a crack to see what it’s like.

• Aspyr Media is working to port Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth to the Linux platform and they say they are weeks away from finishing the work and launching the game.

• The holiday season is upon us and that means family, friends, fond memories, and food. I thought I would reminisce and revisit of some classic computer adventure games that I played with family and friends when I was younger. These classic games are playable on modern operating systems, including Linux, by using open source tools: DOSBox, ResidualVM, and ScummVM.

• Red Awakening, the First Person Action/Horror game by the guys over at Domino Effect, may be coming to Linux.

• Goat Simulator has recently been updated with the Goat MMO Simulator Expansion, which brings new features like five different classes, faction warfare between goats and sheep, and MMO simulation.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE has improved in may respects since my last review of Kubuntu, so it’s fair to say that Kubuntu itself has improved. Muon Discover has improved too, so kudos to the developer. However, Kubuntu is not the best KDE-using distribution around. ROSA Desktop, for example, offers many more features than most KDE-using desktops. That said, Kubuntu 14.10 should be good enough for most users. If you would like to take it for a spin on your computer, installation images are available for download from here.

• Many years ago Ubuntu had a plan for Grumpy Groundhog, a version of Ubuntu which was made from daily packages of free software development versions. This never happened but Kubuntu has long provided Project Neon (and later Project Neon 5) which used launchpad to build all of KDE Software Compilation and make weekly installable images. This is great for developers who want to check their software works in a final distribution or want to develop against the latest libraries without having to compile them, but it didn’t help us packagers much because the packaging was monolithic and unrelated to the packages we use in Kubuntu real.

• The KDE Project developers have announced that the 14.12 Beta 3 version of KDE Applications has been released and is now ready for download and testing.

• Now that this particular branch of the KDE project is getting closer to the release, some distributions and developers have added the packages to some repositories. Before trying to test it you should check if it’s already available in the local repos.

• “Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of KDE Applications. With dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. With various applications being based on KDE Frameworks 5, the KDE Applications 14.12 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience,” wrote the developers on the official website.

Distributions

• Over the past year, I’ve spent more time than ever using rolling release Linux distributions. My experiences have been positive and negative, depending on the distribution and system updates applied.

• Having tried a number of different rolling release distros, I’ll be speaking frankly in this article about a solid case against rolling release distributions. But before you jump to any conclusions, it’s worth reading the entire piece to better understand where I’m going with this.

Reviews

• KDE has improved in may respects since my last review of Kubuntu, so it’s fair to say that Kubuntu itself has improved. Muon Discover has improved too, so kudos to the developer. However, Kubuntu is not the best KDE-using distribution around. ROSA Desktop, for example, offers many more features than most KDE-using desktops. That said, Kubuntu 14.10 should be good enough for most users. If you would like to take it for a spin on your computer, installation images are available for download from here.

• The Makulu Cinnamon Debian Edition 1.1 marks a new path for Makulu. This latest release has numerous new features that could make it a top competitor against the Linux Mint Cinnamon edition.

• I wrote about KaOS Linux some time ago, when the 2014.06 release came out. I had it installed on a couple of my laptops, and I have been using it occasionally since then. It is a rolling release distribution, so if you already have it installed, you don’t need to get these new ISO images and install them, you just have to make sure that you are current with all the latest patches and updates.

• I must say, GNOME 3 has come up a long way from being really unintuitive desktop environment to a more intuitive and efficient one. I really like what I see in Ubuntu GNOME 14.10. It is aesthetically very refined, intuitive, supports multi-touch (with GNOME 3.14 upgrade) and is very efficient. Plus, the customization options are good and you don’t need to be a techno wizard to make those changes.

• Though the distro has a support period of 9 months, you can safely try it out. I bet you’ll definitely enjoy it. Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 is definitely recommended from my side with the 2nd highest score I gave to any GNOME or GNOME forked (Cinnamon, Mate, Unity, etc.) distro that I reviewed during 2013-14.

New Releases

• Evolve OS is a Linux-based operating system made from scratch that uses a new desktop environment called Budgie. Its developer has put together a fundraiser for the distribution so that he can devote more time to it and eventually make a stable release.

• Distro Astro 3.0 is a Linux operating system based on Ubuntu that is designed specifically for astronomers. It packs pretty much all of the most interesting applications regarding this field of study and it’s probably the only one of its kind.

• SolydX is a Debian based distribution with the Xfce desktop. It intends to be as light-weight as possible without giving up any of the expected functionality.

• OpenELEC 5.0 Beta 3, an embedded operating system built specifically to run the KODI media center, the open source entertainment media hub, has been released and is now available for testing.

• François Dupoux released a new version of the popular SystemRescueCd Linux-based operating system for rescue and recovery tasks, and the version of the OS is now 4.4.1.

• The developer of Evolve OS, Ikey Doherty, announced that a new version of the Budgie desktop has been released and users can now test it freely, either in this one distro or in Ubuntu.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

Arch Family

• The first RC version of Manjaro KDE 0.8.11, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories that uses a custom version of KDE, is now available for download and testing.

• The first Release Candidate for Manjaro Xfce 0.8.11, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has been made available and is now ready for testing.

Slackware Family

• Porteus, a portable Linux distro that can run from a USB device, CD ROM, SD card, or hard drive, and that is based on Slackware, has just received a new testing version and is now available for download.

Red Hat Family

• Somebody’s putting all their chips on Red Hat’s next quarterly report.

• Apart from CentOS, another distro I have really been waiting to explore is Scientific Linux. With its solid RedHat base plus extra software, it could be an excellent contender for the ultimate desktop distro. And so our quest continues.

• What will amaze you even more is my decision to try the Gnome edition. Yup, after some three years of ignoring Gnome due to its stupidity, I decided to give it another try, just for fun, to see what gives. Maybe it can redeem itself, or be redeemed by Scientific Linux. Either way, it’s an interesting test.

• Red Hat, that long time central hub of all things good and true and open source is appearing more and more to live up to its reputation of being, as one industry commentator put it, the Oracle ORCL -0.82% of open source. And that didn’t refer to buying islands and sponsoring yacht races either. The company has had something of a recent history of, if not playing dirty, at least being a little aggressive in its commercial activities. A recently regular target of its attacks has been Mirantis, itself no stranger to controversy and storms.

• In the world of cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies, there are now two primary open-source competitors, the Red Hat backed OpenShift and the Pivotal backed CloudFoundry.

• The CloudFoundry PaaS project was officially launched by VMware back in 2011. In 2012, then VMware CTO stated that his vision was for CloudFoundry to be, “the Linux of the cloud.”

• The idea of cross-team collaboration is spreading its tentacles to almost every part of the enterprise. The latest area to get a dose of the collaboration goodness is development and, in particular (at least this week) mobile development. A couple of days ago it was Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) vendor Kinvey announcing teams functionality and today it is the turn of FeedHenry, the formerly independent MBaaS vendor that is now a part of Red Hat RHT -0.44%. Red Hat is announcing a new version of FeedHenry that includes functionality aimed at helping development teams collaborate over their projects.

Fedora

• As Fedora 21 approaches, let’s take a bit to examine the state of the Cloud Working Group (WG) — or, more importantly, the releases that are coming your way very soon! With Fedora 21 you’ll have two distinct Fedora “flavors” from the Cloud WG: ready to run images for public and private clouds, and Fedora 21 Atomic Host. And, to pique the buzzword crowd’s interest, here’s a spoiler – we’ll be talking about Docker.

• Yesterday, Fedora Infrastructure went into “freeze”. This happens at the same time in the Fedora release cycle as the development freezes.

• First, what is a ‘freeze’? We mark all our hosts (with ansible variables) as either freezing or non freezing. Hosts are assumed to freeze unless they specifically are marked non freezing. If a host is non freezing, there’s no change for it. We could update it’s configuration in puppet or ansible, reinstall it, apply updates, reboot it, whatever we normally would like to do with it. However, if the host is frozen, we have to follow a new process to make any changes on it: A patch or description of the change has to be mailed to the fedora infrastructure list and get two people to approve it that are in the sysadmin-main or releng groups.

• The article dives into the productization of Fedora 21 that hopes to deliver a better experience for workstation, server, and cloud users. The article suggests that Red Hat drove Fedora development and that the goals of Red Hat and Fedora are closely aligned.

• I can’t believe that my internship started almost a year ago! I participated in the seventh session of the Outreach Program for Women working on Fedora Badges. Time has gone by so quickly! Since my internship ended in March I have continued to stay active on the Fedora Badges project, creating more badge designs and helping others design their own. To date I have designed or collaborated on 97 badge designs in the Fedora Badges system.

Debian Family

• In January 2010 Mattel Inc decided Barbie – formally known as Barbara Millicent Roberts – needed another career. She’s had no shortage of job changes, but given her sporty cars and expensive fashion tastes it would appear Barbie is top of her game no matter what industry she deigns to dabble in.

• Some people may have seen recently that the Barbie series has a rather sexist book out about Barbie the Computer Engineer. Fortunately, there’s a way to improve this by making your own version.

• Thus, I made a short version about Barbie the Debian Developer and init system packager.

• Ian Jackson, a Debian developer and member of the Debian Technical Committee, has handed his resignation following the vote to preserve the freedom of choice for init systems.

• Ian Jackson resigns from technical committee after measure to slow systemd adoption fails.

• Some days I feel super lazy but I still would like to go on contributing translations to Debian. Then, I leave the web translations a bit, and change to translate or review Debian package descriptions.

• It’s something that anybody can do without any knowledge of translation tools, since it is a very simple web interface, as you will see.

• Another day brings another Debian resignation. In other news, Mageia 3 is reaching its end-of-life and The Var Guy has some highlights from SUSECon. Dedoimedo.com says Scientific Linux 7 is “poorly executed” and Mozilla says losing Google partnership promotes choice and innovation. And Softpedia.com said today that Ubuntu’s Unity is starting to look like a desktop.

• The Debian and systemd debate has pushed yet another developer to quit an important role in the Debian project. Tollef Fog Heen has resigned his position because of the constant attacks regarding the implementation of systemd in Debian.

• I’ve rebuilt many Debian packages over the years, largely to fix bugs which affected me, or to add features which didn’t make the cut in various releases. For example I made a package of fabric available for Wheezy, since it wasn’t in the release. (Happily in that case a wheezy-backport became available. Similar cases involved repackaging gtk-gnutella when the protocol changed and the official package in the lenny release no longer worked.)

Derivatives

• The Linux Mint team is working on a Debian-based version of their distribution and it looks like things are coming along. The devs have made some progress with the Cinnamon integration and users might soon get a real choice.

• New information about LMDE 2.0 has been released. It looks like systemd will be used as the default init service manager, like Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian Jessie and support for GTK 3.14 will be implemented.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is working on the next generation of Unity for Ubuntu, which is going to arrive by default in a couple of years. Until then, the upcoming Unity 8 is taking some baby steps in becoming a full-fledged desktop environment.

• The new Ubuntu Touch operating system is almost ready and it will be soon integrated in a number of devices. The good news is that users can see what the OS works and looks like without having a phone to test it.

• Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is the next operating system from Canonical and it follows the same six-month development cycle. This means that the upcoming release is set to release in April, more precisely on April 23.

• For those who don’t know yet, the development of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet has started a few days after the release of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn. Like Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 15.04 will be also using Unity 7 and X.org by default, but Unity 8 and Mir will be installable via the default repositories.

• DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is involved in a number of interesting projects, including robotic technology, and it looks like Ubuntu is playing an important role.

• Zentyal Server 4.0, a small Linux business server that can be configured as Directory Server, Domain Controller, Zentyal Mail Server, Gateway, Unified Threat Manager (UTM), Unified Communications Server or a combination of them, has been released with many improvements, better and easier web management console, bug fixes and is now available for download.

• Systemd is still gettings lots of media attention, and now it seems that the folks at Canonical are preparing to switch to it in a future version of Ubuntu. Version 15.04 could be the first time Ubuntu users see systemd in their favorite distribution.

• I agree with Jono that there is a need for leadership and inspiration. I felt a malaise slip over a large portion of the existing Ubuntu community when Canonical’s focus adverted to the Ubuntu phone. I think a significant portion of the community feels at odds with Canonical’s direction as evidenced by some of the recent tension with Kubuntu, and discussions about copyright and trademark.

Flavours and Variants

• Lubuntu-LXQt is an unofficial spin of the Lubuntu distro that is using the LXQT desktop environment instead of LXDE. It’s not supported in any way and it’s built more like a proof of concept.

• Linux Mint 17.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

• Two days ago I had a look at the release candidate of the upcoming Mint 17.1 Cinnamon, which is set to arrive in late November. Today I will take a quick look at the main applications that come bundled by default in the Mint 17.1 Rebecca installation disc, with a short overview and screenshots for each of them.

Devices/Embedded

• Intel and Opening Ceremony unveiled a $495, Linux-based “MICA” smart bracelet with 3G data, Facebook notifications, navigation, and “intelligent reminders.”

• Intel teased its MICA (My Intelligent Communication Accessory) bracelet at the launch of the Edison module in September. Yet, while it is similarly based on Linux, the MICA appears to be too small to house the Edison. The MICA is co-designed by fashion design house Opening Ceremony, which along with Barneys, will begin selling the smart bracelet in early December for $495 via their retail and online venues.

• There are some seriously cool Raspberry Pi-powered products on the way. Here are 3 that make us want to throw money at our screens…

• While the Raspberry Pi has always been cheap, the Foundation didn’t rest on their laurels with the Model A+ price. In fact, Google’s Eric Schmidt had a hand in making it cheaper…

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung has announced that it is reduce one third of its Smartphones that it produces in an effort to cut prices in the face of stiff chinese competition.

• Over the last few months there has been a steady leak of information regarding Samsung’s upcoming Tizen based budget Smartphone SM-Z130H, and now courtesy of a system dump our friends at Sammobile have been able to extract some information and screenshots.

Android

• Some users are reporting that there’s an issue with Google’s new Android 5.0 Lollipop update that prevents them from sending text messages, according to a thread in Google’s official forum for tracking bugs in Android (via Phone Arena).

• In the original complaint, one user says he or she is unable to send SMS text messages. The message would appear to be sent, but the receiver would never actually get the text.

• If you can’t wait for the launch of the official Ubuntu smartphones (the first models are supposedly due later this year), don’t want to shell out for a new phone anyhow, or would prefer to use a different version of Linux on a portable device, there is an alternative. It’s possible to run a variety of popular Linux distros on a standard Android smartphone or tablet – everything from a simple BusyBox toolset right up to a full distribution with a desktop environment. You don’t even need to root your phone for some of the methods that we explore in this feature.

• “They said Nokia is dead,” Nokia’s head of devices Sebastian Nyström, pictured below, said as he started out his presentation today. “I say, they couldn’t be more wrong.” After the N1, there will be more products to come.

• What ended up happening, though, was that Nokia sold its handset business to Microsoft and has been pursuing its own Android-focused initiatives, including delivering a brand new $250 Android tablet. It’s dubbed the N1 and is seen here.

• One of the best things about Android is that apps have a lot more freedom compared to those found on iPhones.

• Today, most apps launch on both Android and iOS, but the most interesting Android apps are exclusive to Android because they do something Apple wouldn’t allow.

• Android 5.0 Lollipop—and the app updates that were released with it—changed the look of Android quite a bit. Google’s new design style, called “Material Design,” makes the OS more colorful, more consistent, and even more of a “light OS” than before. While we covered the OS in detail in our Lollipop review, we thought it would be fun to take a look at how the apps have changed during the journey from KitKat to Lollipop. In the above gallery, we’ve rounded up before-and-after shots of the major changes.

• After what feels like a long time since we saw the L Preview first appear, Google is now rolling out the final version of Android 5.0 Lollipop to its existing Nexus devices, and it also appears on the brand new Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 gadgets. Get to know the best version of Android yet by working through this selection of tips and tricks, covering all of the new features, major and minor, that are built into the operating system.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The Jolla Tablet is different from any slate currently on the market, and what makes it stand out is its operating system. More specifically, Jolla aims to take on Android and iOS with its own Sailfish OS, which is an open-source platform based on Linux.

• The Jolla Tablet runs Sailfish OS. Oddly enough, Sailfish OS can apparently run Android applications too, which might make it more appealing to current Android tablet owners who want to switch to a different mobile operating system without entering the Apple ecosystem.

• Like the Ubuntu Edge campaign that spectacularly failed/spectacularly smashed funding records, Jolla has turned to the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo to help make their Android-rivalling slate a bona fide reality.

• In barely a few hours Jolla has already surpassed its $380,000 target. And while that goal may sound cheap when compared to the $32 million Canonical sought to raise, the hardware the Fins are offering is anything but:

• Jolla quickly hit the Indiegogo goal for its first Sailfish-based tablet, with a quad-core Intel SoC, while Nokia tipped a similar Atom-based Android slate.

• An outfit called the Demski Group has launched a Kickstarter campaign to support development of MAGE, a platform for building mobile apps without having to write code. On its own, that would not be interesting news—there’s plenty of similar stuff out there already—but what makes it noteworthy is Demski Group is the same company is behind the UT One, the Ubuntu Linux-based tablet whose release could come as early as next month.

• Jolla, the company set up by former Nokia executives to keep the Meego operating system alive, raised more than US$841,000 on Wednesday, the first day of its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

Free Software/Open Source

• One of the strengths of the open source community has been its ability to bring concentrated effort to bear on big problems. When tragedy strikes, or a pressing need arises, there are groups of people who gather together to attempt to solve the problems as a community.

• Earlier this year SanDisk committed to becoming an open source player, created an open source strategy office and joined the Linux Foundation. Since then, the flash storage company has begun contributing to open source projects in the three main areas of its business: mobile, enterprise and hyperscale computing, and consumer products, said Nithya Ruff, director of the open source strategy office at SanDisk in an online presentation yesterday.

• ClusterHQ says it has taken a major step toward making Docker, the open source, container-based virtualization platform, viable for enterprise production use in major public clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace (RAX), thanks to integration of its Flocker data-storage tool with Docker Fig.

• With what is being heralded as a look back to 1960s approaches to surveys and statistics, Google has announced a new open source project that seeks to collect data about users’ computers without invading their privacy. Dubbed RAPPOR, it is available on GitHub, and has been announced at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, which is often a venue for announcements of new technologies.

• An emoji library may seem an unlikely source of best practices for open source. But Twitter’s careful work provides an excellent guide

Events

• We’re currently accepting submissions for Vault, The Linux Foundation’s Linux storage and filesystem conference, happening this March 11 and 12 in Boston, MA. The call for proposals will remain open until December 1. Submit a session proposal and register to get your space.

Web Browsers

• The Web browser acts as the gateway for myriad online services these days. Computer security problems are far from solved, and technology advances provide new ways for malware to infect our devices and enter our business networks. For example, smartphones and tablets offer fresh new fields for malware—and its malicious cousin, “malvertising”—to exploit.

• Cisco this week announced the availability of an open source security framework designed to harness big data analytics to combat data loss.

Chrome

• SSL 3.0 Fallback gets disabled as Google pays out $41,500 in awards to researchers for finding security vulnerabilities in the new browser release.

SaaS/Big Data

• Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has moved to make big data analysis and exploration easier—and to strengthen its relationship with major Hadoop vendors Hortonworks, MapR and Cloudera—with the release this week of HP Vertica for SQL on Hadoop, which aims to simplify queries on HDFS data.

Databases

• MongoDB’s Dwight Merriman and I were about thirty minutes into our conversation at All Things Open. Lunch time was approaching and I was definitely hungry. Merriman was getting a little antsy, ready to wrap it up, but there were a few more things I wanted to talk about first.

CMS

• This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.1, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

Education

• In iterative development, the process of designing, coding, testing and evaluating becomes a cycle rather than once and for all. Most modern software development fits into this pattern or a variant of it, hence new versions of software are regularly released which fix bugs that only became apparent once the software was released, or implement new features, in response to customer suggestions, technical innovations or market pressures. Often developers will release an early ‘beta’ version of their software, perhaps to a limited number or quite openly, to get help with testing and evaluating the software before committing to an official final release. This is common practice in open source development, where the users of the software are positively encouraged to help with fixing as well as finding bugs or adding code for new features themselves.

• Too many people ask, “What is the future of libraries?” and not, “What should the future be?” A book that we must read is: Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries For Today’s Complex World. If we don’t expect more of libraries, we’re not going to see libraries change. We have to change the frame of mind that libraries belong the directors—they actually belong to the people and they should be serving the people.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• It is no surprise that reducing operational IT expenditures, while simultaneously increasing the level of security and software capabilities, is a top priority for most enterprises.

• Open source software, which uses an open development process, is proliferating across the globe given the advantages it offers over traditional forms of software. Open source solutions can be modified and adapted to fit the needs of various companies – something that’s often not possible with proprietary software.

Funding

BSD

• The FreeBSD project has received a massive $1 million (€800,000) donation from one of the WhatsApp co-founders, Jan Koum, and the developers are more than thrilled at the fact that they have secured their future, at least for a while.

• Yes we know, PC-BSD isn’t Linux, it’s BSD (actually FreeBSD to be precise), but aside from the kernel, it shares many of the same tools than any Linux distribution will include.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We are pleased to announce the next alpha release of GNU Guix, version 0.8.

• The release comes both with a source tarball, which allows you to install it on top a running GNU/Linux system, and a USB installation image to install the standalone operating system.

• Conversely, for all the talk of political freedom, the usual free cost has also encouraged the spread of free software. Corporate startups, developing nations, the impoverished, the handicapped — all have gravitated towards free software despite their doubts, because the free price was the definitive argument.

Licensing

• Misconceptions surrounding the rights and obligations provided by open source software in the enterprise have fueled the spread of fear, uncertainty and doubt. A better understanding of the role open source licensing will help organizations realist the full potential of open source investments.

Openness/Sharing

• In the local food movement, open source principles are very much like the open pollinated seeds that farmers keep to grow next year’s crops. When farmers use their own seeds, they are in control of breeding and conserving for the future. In contrast, closed source and software as a service (SaaS) providers are more like the companies with patented seeds who exert control over farmers by requiring them to purchase new seeds each year, sometimes even controlling the sale of the harvested crops.

• As a society, we are far removed from our food sources and even further from understanding how they work. Most of us interact with the food system as unconscious consumers, wandering supermarket aisles or restaurant menus with little thought about where the food comes from, how it will affect us, or the consequences of how it was raised or produced. As such, we are in no position to make change for the better.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

• From the beginning, the Internet was built on a set of open development principles, that are now recognized as the OpenStand Principles. As the Internet turns 25 this year, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, sat down to reflect back on the first days of its existence. In the below video, he discusses how far web information has come, and how much more ground there is left to cover.

• Interoperability and the easy exchange of data is a major concern in the buildup of the Internet of Things (IoT). To ensure those attributes, a set of commonly accepted standards will be needed. So, do we need to create those standards, or do we already have enough standards and simply need to pick and choose?

Leftovers

Security

• Cisco, Akamai, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and others join together in a new effort to expand cryptography use on the Web. In the quest for improved user security on the Internet, encryption is a key tool, though it hasn’t always been easy to use and deploy. Today, a group of organizations—including Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust and researchers at the University of Michigan—joined with the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) to announce the Let’s Encrypt initiative.

• Like most families these days, our family is extremely busy. We have four boys who have activities and appointments. My wife and I both have our own businesses as well as outside activities. For years, we’ve been using eGroupware to help coordinate our schedules and manage contacts. The eGroupware system has served us well for a long time. However, it is starting to show its age. As a Web-based groupware system, it’s pretty well polished, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Kontact or Thunderbird. Also, my wife finds that she needs to access her calendar from her Android phone, and eGroupware just isn’t very mobile-friendly. Sure, we can set up calendar synchronization, but eGroupware seems to have added synchronization as an afterthought, and it really doesn’t work as well as we’d like.

• In recent months, without a lot of fanfare, major technology firms have been open sourcing extremely sophisticated security tools. A number of these are flying under the radar, but they are worth knowing about. Here are some of most useful tools to be open sourced recently by Google, Facebook and Netflix.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• At least 28 people have been killed in US drone strikes in Afghanistan in November so far. Several of those were involved in tribal fighting against the Afghan government, but at least five were small children and total non-combatants were probably in double figures. These deaths do not go reported at all in western media. Cameron and Miliband both started at Prime Minister’s Questions today by condemning the killings in Jerusalem. No chance they will ever mention the ongoing US murders in Afghanistan, let alone the three Palestinians killed by Israelis lately, including a taxi driver lynched by Israeli illegal settlers.

• pbs-warner-isisPBS NewsHour correspondent Margaret Warner (11/18/14) had on the US Treasury official, David Cohen, who’s in charge of trying to counter ISIS by cutting off its finances. But it seems like it’s hard to talk to an elite media host for very long before they start fantasizing about blowing things up.

• Conservative media outlets are misleadingly promoting the report that a Washington state museum will return some firearms on display to their owners following the passage of a new background check initiative, while ignoring statements from law enforcement that there is no legal reason to remove the guns.

• On November 4, a majority of Washington voters passed Initiative 594, a proposal to require a background check on nearly all gun sales in the state, with some exceptions for temporary transfers and transfers between family members.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Leaked documents expose a plan by Edelman for TransCanada to launch an “aggressive” American-style policy/politics PR campaign to persuade Canadians to support a Canada-based alternative to the stalled Keystone XL pipeline to get controversial tar sands oil to refineries in eastern Canada for export.

• With the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline heating up, pundits and editorial pages are finding it hard to figure out why on earth anyone would be opposed to a massive new fossil fuel extraction project. Keystone opponents are the “tea party of the left,” according to Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (11/17/14).

Finance

• Democratic state legislators in Illinois are mulling an effort to thwart Chicago’s effort to raise its minimum wage, even as they raise the state wage above the national average. And the state National Restaurant Association affiliate is eating it up.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Calling for a “reboot” of public education in Minnesota, hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed into the Minneapolis school board elections this November to try ousting an incumbent and to usher in an education agenda that resembles that of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Privacy

• However, their advice that you can install an app onto a Windows computer or iPhone to detect spyware is like telling people that putting a seatbelt on a motorbike will eliminate the risk of death.

• Open Rights Group has responded to a report by Channel 4 News that Cable & Wireless allowed GCHQ to scoop up the private communications of millions of people around the world.

Civil Rights

• Missouri Governor Jay Nixon on Monday issued a state of emergency and activated the National Guard in anticipation of the grand jury announcement about whether Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will be charged with the August 9 shooting of Michael Brown.

• The unarmed teen’s controversial death sparked weeks worth of protests, many of which were met with overwhelming police force. The killing also inspired a national debate about police shootings and law enforcement’s relationship with black Americans. (The Department of Justice is currently investigating the Ferguson police department.)

• Yet, the Reagan administration nonetheless declared it would exercise its “discretion by allowing minor children to remain in the United States even though they do not qualify on their own, but whose parents (or single parent in the case of divorce or death of spouse) have qualified” for legalization under the law.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Günther Oettinger, Digital Commissioner made his first post on his blog in which he clearly introduces garanteeing internet access in rural zones as justification to give in to the demands of the Telcos to consolidate or increase their unwarranted earnings. Although the author has tried to avoid mentioning Net Neutrality, this blog post reveals his intended strategy regarding this principle.

• After EU Commissioner Oettinger’s outrageous blog post, the bad news keeps on coming from the front of Net Neutrality. The principle, strongly defended by the Members of the European Parliament on April 3rd is worryingly jeopardized by an agreement currently discussed within the Council of the European Union. Governments are about to give in to the demands of big telecom operators by creating Internet fast-lanes whose access will be sold to dominant online services like YouTube or Netflix. Such unacceptable move, amounting to discriminating communications of all EU citizens, must be denounced by our representatives at the EU Parliament!

• This gratuitous element has the fingerprints of lobbyists all over it. It looks like yet another demonstration of how destructive and selfish the copyright industry is. As we’ve seen time and again – with the UK’s Digital Economy Act, for example – it cares little what collateral damage it causes to anyone else in its blinkered obsession with protecting outdated and broken business models. The latest bad news on net neutrality is a further reason why thoroughgoing European copyright reform is urgently required, and needs to be radical enough to minimise the malign influence of the music and publishing industries in the future.

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