● 12.10.14

● Links 10/12/2014: Fedora 21, Ubuntu Core

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Jack’s a writer who uses a software development environment to write. He’s a big Geany fan and he reminds us that tools aren’t about what they’re supposed to do so much as they’re about how we choose to use them. Jack is also a big Cinnamon desktop fan. Cinnamon doesn’t come up a lot around here, so it’s always nice to see it getting some attention (even though I can’t tell the difference between Cinnamon and Mate!).

Kernel Space

• It’s no longer debatable that most technologies today are built with open source software and collaborative development. Everyone knows this to be true. What’s become more the topic of discussion in recent years is how to support and manage these massive, shared resources we call open source projects and the developers who work on them.

• Almost exactly two months after the release of Linux 3.17 Linus Torvalds on Sunday unleashed version 3.18 of the Linux kernel complete with a catchy new nickname: “Diseased Newt.

• “It’s been a quiet week, and the patch from rc7 is tiny, so 3.18 is out,” Torvalds wrote in the official announcement email on Sunday evening.

• The merge window for Linux 3.19 is now open, but in the meantime developers are still struggling to understand an occasional lockup problem that has been afflicting some users of Linux 3.17.

Graphics Stack

• Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way the X server code base handles requests from X clients, and has worked with X.Org’s security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Despite its name, NetHack isn’t an online game. It’s based on an earlier dungeon-exploring romp called Hack, which in turn was a descendant of an 1980 game called Rogue. NetHack’s first release arrived in 1987, and although no new features have been added since version 3.4.3 in 2003, various patches, add-ons and spin-offs are still doing the rounds on the web. This makes it arguably the oldest game that’s still being hacked on and played by a sizeable group of people. Go to www.reddit.com/r/nethack to see what we mean – long-time NetHack players are still discussing new strategies, discoveries and tricks. Occasionally you’ll see gleeful messages from old timers who have finally, after many years, completed the game.

• 2K Games has confirmed that they are preparing a Linux port for Bioshock Infinite. They will share more information regarding the port in 2015, presumably the same year it will be published.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The end is nigh. The end is upon us. We are, of course, talking about the end of the calendar year, and this means voting for the best of the best. In a few days, we will have the grand Dedoimedo best distro contest, but before we do that, let’s do a more specific vote. Namely, let’s elect the finest KDE distro of the current year.

Distributions

• Recently, I burned the ISO file for another Ubuntu-based distro. We’ve played with this distro in the past and found it to our liking for one simple reason. Like Mint, It makes available some of the codecs and “restricted” goodies that the regular releases of many distros does not.

Slackware Family

• Porteus is a portable Linux distro that can run from a USB device, CD ROM, SD card, or hard drive, and is using Slackware as its base. The developers have released a new upgrade for it and they have updated a number of core packages.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• The top story today is the release of Fedora 21. Jamie Watson said it was worth the year-long development wait and it was so anticipated that Fedora infrastructure suffered a major service disruption. Servers were reported down today at 4:41 PM but all systems were a GO by 7:21 this evening. Adam Williamson also posted about the beginnings of work on version 22, so no rest for the weary.

• Fedora 21 has just been released, featuring the latest stable GNOME 3.14 along with other interesting changes.

• The Fedora Project’s latest version of the open source Fedora operating system have released Fedora 21.

• The Fedora Project is pleased to announce Fedora 21, the final release, ready to run on your desktops, servers, and in the cloud. Fedora 21 is a game-changer for the Fedora Project, and we think you’re going to be very pleased with the results.

• What’s next for Fedora Linux is the Fedora 21 release, which arrives today after a longer than expected wait.

• The screen-grab above shows the status of as many Fedora resources as I could fit in the image (and you can see them all on the Fedora Infrastructure Status page).

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A few years ago, Ubuntu launched a minimalist “core” version of its operating system for embedded systems. Today, it is launching an alpha version of its new “snappy” edition of Ubuntu Core with transactional updates that is specifically geared toward container farms, large Docker deployments and platform-as-a-service environments. The first place you will be able to see Ubuntu Core in action is on Microsoft Azure (or you could install it on your own servers, of course).

• What if your cloud instances could be updated with the same certainty and precision as your mobile phone – with carrier grade assurance that an update applies perfectly or is not applied at all? What if your apps could be isolated from one another completely, so there’s no possibility that installing one app could break another, and stronger assurance that a compromise of one app won’t compromise the data from another? When we set out to build the Ubuntu Phone we took on the challenge of raising the bar for reliability and security in the mobile market. And today that same technology is coming to the cloud, in the form of a new “snappy” image called Ubuntu Core, which is in beta today on Azure and as a KVM image you can run on any Linux machine.

• Canonical published details about a JasPer vulnerability in its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems. The problem is not series, but it’s not a bad idea to upgrade.

• Ubuntu is the most widely used GNU/Linux based operating system in the world. It is evolving from a server/desktop OS to one that will run the same codebase across devices such as TVs, desktops, tablets and smartphones.

• To better understand this transition and get an idea what Ubuntu would look like in future I spoke with Will Cooke, Ubuntu Desktop Engineering Manager.

• The war for which operating system will be the leading cloud operating system is taking some new twists. Today, the name of the game is who can have the smallest operating system image that supports containers.

Flavours and Variants

• I guess I discussed sometime back in my blog that Linux Mint won’t pursue Ubuntu’s schedule of releasing a new distro every 6 months and instead focus on Ubuntu’s LTS releases. True to their promise, they have released an update to the Linux Mint 17 LTS, nicknamed “Rebecca”. The release notes states of the following incremental improvements: “The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17.1 ‘Rebecca’ MATE. 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. Linux Mint 17.1 MATE edition comes with two window managers installed and configured by default: Marco (MATE’s very own window manager, simple, fast and very stable); Compiz (an advanced compositing window manager which can do wonders if your hardware supports it). Among the various window managers available for Linux, Compiz is certainly the most impressive when it comes to desktop effects.”

Devices/Embedded

• Hardkernel’s $35 “Odroid-C1″ SBC runs Android or Ubuntu on a 1.5GHz quad-core Amlogic SoC, and boasts 1GB RAM plus quasi-RPi-compatible 40-pin expansion.

• Aaeon’s “AEC-6638″ rugged box-PC offers 4th Gen Intel Core i5 or i3 CPUs, and features three display outputs, dual GbE, and fanless -10 to 60°C operation.

Phones

Android

• With a five star average on the App Store and a secure spot in the top 10 free games, Crossy Road has seemingly conquered the world… unless you’re an Android gamer. If you’re an Android gamer, you’re very likely asking “Crossy what now?”

• Google announced on Tuesday that after two years of work, it is finally ready to release its IntelliJ-based integrated development environment (IDE), Android Studio, to the wider world with its 1.0 release.

• While Android Studio will generally offer a better experience for Android developers than the traditional Eclipse development used, the kicker for developers wedded to Eclipse is the discontinuation of the Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin for Eclipse that integrates a number of Android tools into the IDE.

Free Software/Open Source

Databases

• MARIADB LAUNCHED the latest release of MariaDB Enterprise on Tuesday with support for tailored software configuration notifications and IBM Power8 hardware systems as well as Suse Linux distributions.

• “MariaDB Enterprise’s new Notification Service means that crawling through lengthy change logs and wondering if the latest security vulnerability will affect database performance are in the past,” the firm said.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Well this is exactly one of the most common mistakes. Making templates for Writer is NOT converting Word templates. Its building new templates from scratch using the best tool for it: LibreOffice. If you choose the short cut and converts Word templates to LibreOffice templates, you will get into trouble. Big trouble.

Funding

• The lead vendor behind the open-source Nginx Web server is looking to fund its growth for the next 10 years.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free Software has made great strides in all kinds of areas and improved our lives. Nonetheless there are still many areas where people don’t have the freedom to use, study, modify and redistribute software that is important to them.

Public Services/Government

• he EU has pretty strongly emphasized that government procurement should not prop up monopoly, yet the practice continues.

• Each year 15 per cent of public administrations flout procurement rules by requesting specific brands and trademarks that prevent competition, shows a European study into 12.808 ICT procurement requests published over the past five years. Nearly a quarter of all awarded ICT requests got one single offer, also indicating there is a lack of competition when it comes to government ICT solutions.

Openness/Sharing

• Today the R&D Lab is opening up the platform that powers the whole thing. Hive is an open-source framework that lets anyone build their own crowdsourcing project. The code responsible for Hive is now available on GitHub. With Hive, a developer can create assignments for users, define what they need to do, and keep track of their progress in helping to solve problems.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Congress is taking some whole grains off the school lunch line.

• A massive year-end spending bill released Tuesday doesn’t allow schools to opt out of healthier school meal standards championed by first lady Michelle Obama, as House Republicans had sought. But it would ease standards that require more whole grains in school foods.

• The bill also would put off rules to lower sodium in school meals. Those rules were supposed to kick in by 2017.

Security

• “bugs that allow hackers to hijack PCs via Internet Explorer, Word and Excel files, and Visual Basic scripts.

• Everyone is urged to install the fixes, as well as a batch of updates from Adobe: a flaw in the Flash plugin is already being exploited by hackers to take over victims’ computers via the web.” It would be tedious if it weren’t terrifying but just about every month we learn what the malware-industry already knows, non-FREE software stinks. Just using it to do ordinary things the way they were intended to be used exposes one’s IT to all kinds of criminals. Don’t blame the victims. Blame the purveyors of this garbage, M$ and Adobe, who force the world to use their stuff only to be victimized.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• If you wish to see a target of Saudi inaction, it is the United States, not Russia.

Finance

• In the “developed world” wage growth in 2012 was 0.1 percent, and in 2013 it was 0.2 percent. Far from portending any economic “recovery,” that level of wage “growth” is rather called “wage stagnation.” In stunning contrast, wage growth in the major emerging growth economies was much better: 6.7 percent in 2012 and 5.9 percent in 2013.

• Economist Richard Wolff compares the stagnation of wages in the U.S. for the past 30 years to the increase in wages in emerging markets and explains why capital left America.

Civil Rights

• On Tuesday morning, the Senate intelligence committee released an executive summary of its years-long investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. President George W. Bush authorized the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program after the 9/11 attacks. The United States government this week has warned personnel in facilities abroad, including US embassies, to be ready in case protests erupt in response.

• The Justice Department may not be prosecuting the torture-memo writers, but John Sifton asks, what about those who killed an estimated 100 detainees during interrogations?

• A look at then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden’s testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on April 12, 2007, compared with the extensive summary on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program, released on Tuesday.

• Can I just say how pleasant it is to be vindicated ten years after being sacked by Jack Straw for opposing the torture and extraordinary rendition programme – which Blair and Straw claimed I was inventing.

• The early report at the Washington Post website about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of CIA torture is gripping, well-documented and sickening. But one thing jumps out: The paper doesn’t use the word “torture” to describe the CIA’s torture program. And that’s not an accident.

• Conservative media celebrated the effectiveness of torture in response to news that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee would release its report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) detention and interrogation program, attacking the Senate for releasing the report and disputing the report’s findings. Military and interrogation experts have emphasized that torture is an ineffective interrogation technique, and human rights groups support the release of the report.

• The CIA was alerted of allegations that anal exams at Cobalt were conducted with “excessive force.” An attorney was asked to follow up, but no records indicate what happened next. Agency records said that one of the detainees housed at Cobalt, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, was later diagnosed with chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse.

• Former Australian detainee at Guantanamo Bay makes claims after damning report into CIA torture methods revealed

• Two psychologists were paid $81 million by the CIA to advise on and help implement its brutal interrogation program targeting detainees in the war on terror, according to the Senate torture report summary released Tuesday.

• The contract psychologists are identified with pseudonyms — Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar — like most of the individuals named in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA program. Published reports dating back to 2007, however, identify the two men as James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, both former members of the military.

• “In 2006, the value of the CIA’s base contract with the company formed by the psychologists with all options exercised was in excess of $180 million; the contractors received $81 million prior to the contract’s termination in 2009. In 2007, the CIA provided a multi-year indemnification agreement to protect the company and its employees from legal liability arising out of the program. The CIA has since paid out more than $1 million pursuant to the agreement.” [Page 11]

• Fox News has condemned the release of a damning report into the CIA’s use of torture as a political manoeuvre designed to show Americans “how we’re not awesome”.

• The broadcaster’s National Security Analyst K.T. McFarland argued that the techniques were both “legal and justified” by the 9/11 terror attacks.

• And she denounced the publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee report as a move made by Democrats to “do harm” to the country by angering terrorists.

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