● 12.15.14

● Links 15/12/2014: OSI 2014 Annual Report, GPLv2 Court Test

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• If all goes according to plan, in June of 2015 HP plans to release a new operating system they’re calling Linux++. Before we start jumping up and down and putting on our party hats, we should know that this is not a new Linux distro being designed by HP to be featured on a new line of laptops. Although based on Linux and Android, this won’t even be an operating system at all in the sense that mortals such as I generally use the term. Most of us won’t be downloading and installing it. If we do, we won’t be using it as a drop-in replacement for Mint, Fedora or any of our other favorite desktop distros.

Desktop

• One of the most popular stories I’ve written explained why I ditched my MacBook Pro for a Chromebook in 2012. Back then I didn’t know how long it would last, but it’s become one of my more long-lived technology changes, sustained for two-plus years with few regrets.

• Not only am I still using my Chromebook, now my business and family do too. Swapping out of Apple’s walled garden for Google’s fenced yard was the right move. I still long for a fully open source solution – an open field in the commons – but I don’t want to make a full-time hobby of keeping my laptop working.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The latest FUSE-based Linux file-system is VRAMFS to provide a general purpose file-system within your graphics card’s dedicated video memory.

• VRAMFS is similar in nature to RAMDISK but uses the dedicated video memory of graphics cards for temporary file storage. VRAMFS will work with users of modern Linux kernel releases who have FUSE file-system support and a discrete GPU that supports OpenCL 1.1.

• The Cloud Foundry Foundation has reached 40 member companies. The foundation was created to establish a formal open governance model for the open source Platform-as-a-Service software project Cloud Foundry.

• Within the in-development Linux 3.19 kernel is now support for LZ4 compression for SquashFS, the read-only file-system commonly used by various Linux distribution live CDs.

• We’re now half-way through the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window so here’s a recap of the most interesting features that have been merged thus far for what will become the first major Linux kernel release of 2015.

Graphics Stack

• Collabora developers are looking at adding a generic DMA-BUF protocol to Wayland, which could benefit media players and other applications.

• Keith Packard who is largely responsible for DRI3 and the Present Extension is looking to take care of one of the flaws of using Present: there can be an extra frame delay if using a compositing window manager with X11.

Benchmarks

• If you haven’t already, drop by LinuxBenchmarking.com to learn about this 32 Linux system benchmarking farm, etc. It’s all powered by the Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org, and Phoromatic. All of the necessary code for this deployment is open-source (GPLv3) via the Phoronix Test Suite on GitHub.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 17.1 (Qiana) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e.that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a securesystem without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 17.1 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype,Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

Games

• Android, Linux and iPhone users patiently waiting for the highly anticipated launch of the Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition will be pleased to know that tomorrow it finally arrives on all three platforms.

• Warhammer Quest, the video game of the Games Workshop tabletop game, launches on PC, Mac and Linux next month.

• Rodeo Games’ bleak turn-based fantasy strategy dungeon crawler, which first launched in 2013 on mobile devices, releases on Steam on 7th January 2015.

• There it costs £10.99 / €14.99 / $14.99. That’s the standard edition, which includes four heroes, three game areas and the Vampires and Zombies tileset and enemies pack.

• NEO Scavenger is a new turn-based survival title made by Blue Bottle Games. It’s been made available for all supported platforms, including the Linux one.

• It’s not secret that Starbound hasn’t updated their “stable” branch for a while, but that is going to end early next year with lots to come. The new trailer has me very excited.

• The full game will be available as an offline DRM free version next summer, but the developer, Maschinen-Mensch, has released an alpha to gather player feedback to help balance procedural aspects of the game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Recently, there were some thoughts on where KDE is going, and related to that what’s the driving force behind it in terms of the pillars of KDE. Albeit it is true our development model changed significantly, I’m not convinced that it’s all about git.

• No, I rather believe that it is the excitement about the KDE that makes it stand out – KDE as a community if you wish, but also KDE as a software project.

Distributions

New Releases

• Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 6.0 SR1, which is Service Release 1. The purpose of our service releases is to focus on security and application updates rather than new features. Service Releases are provided every two to three months in between our 6 month release schedule. Black Lab Linux 6.0 is based on LTS technologies so users can be rest assured that you will receive feature and functionality updates until 2017 and security updates until 2020.

Screenshots

Ballnux/SUSE

• Wipro Ltd. has announced that it has jointly developed with SUSE an OpenStack cloud solution based on Wipro’s own open source cloud tools and SUSE Cloud, SUSE’s enterprise OpenStack cloud platform which is integrated with a cloud management layer, stitching private and public cloud layers together. Here are more details.

Red Hat Family

• RED HAT HAS ANNOUNCED the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.1 Beta with enhancements to improve ease of use, manageability and performance, as well as support for IBM Power8 little endian architecture.

• RHEL 7.1 Beta is the next point release following the enterprise Linux vendor’s initial production release of RHEL 7.0 in June.

Fedora

• The input X.Org drivers currently used by Fedora might by replaced with just the xf86-input-libinput DDX driver for Fedora 22. This input driver relies upon libinput that was originally designed for Wayland/Weston but can be retrofitted just fine as a standalone input driver for the X.Org Server.

• Fedora 19 will reach end of life on 2015-01-06, and no further updates will be pushed out after that time. Additionally, with the recent release of Fedora 21, no new packages will be added to the Fedora 19 collection.

• Those using Fedora’s Wine packages have easy access to enable command stream multi-threading (CSMT) support for Direct3D games to enable better performance.

• Last week Tuesday, we released the 21st version of Fedora. The morning of the release we noticed that the load of some of the proxies was running very high. So we started checking our monitoring for the incoming traffic. A week later, this is an overview of the traffic on our proxies over the last ten days (so 3 days before the release and 7 days since).

• A month ago (or so) we decided to start organizing an event focused on Fedora here in Buenos Aires.

Debian Family

• I just stumbled upon RedHat’s price-list for subscriptions/support for RHEL. It reminded me what a great bargain Debian GNU/Linux is…

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, has released an early version of “Snappy” Ubuntu Core, which provides transactional software updates that result in faster and more reliable updates, as well as rigorous application isolation, the company says.

Devices/Embedded

• Axiomtek’s new, Linux-friendly COM Express module offers 4th gen Core CPUs, triple displays, GbE, PCIe x16 and x1 lanes, and extended temperature operation.

Phones

Tizen

• With so much technology around us, its good to get back to nature on our Tizen based Samsung Gear S Smart Watch, and here are some specially and also exceptionally designed wallpapers just for that very purpose. We hope you enjoy them and gain some pleasure from viewing them.

• OK, hands up who wants to see the Tizen Common wayland image running on the odroid U3 development board?

Android

• Andromium is a new hardware and software combination that aims to provide users with the power of scaling up the smartphone to a full-featured desktop. If you think that this sounds vaguely familiar then you are on right track. It’s like describing Ubuntu for Android all over again.

• Around 70k lines of kernel code were removed, in large part due to stripping out the “horrid” BCM driver. The staging BCM driver isn’t to be confused with any Broadcom hardware driver but rather was the Beceem WiMAX driver. Per Intel’s Jeff Kirsher who removed the Beceem WiMax (BCM) driver, “The Beceem WiMAX driver was barely function in its current state and was non-functional on 64 bit systems. Based on repeated statements from Greg KH that he wanted the driver removed, I am removing the driver.”

Free Software/Open Source

• Linux is an ideal platform for professional audio production. It is an extremely stable operating system that has good support for audio hardware. Using a Linux machine as the focus of your recording setup opens a world of possibilities for an affordable price.

• Ubuntu Studo is an officially recognised version of Ubuntu that is aimed at professional musicians, and audio, video and graphic enthusiasts. The distribution includes an excellent range of open source multimedia software, and has a tweaked Linux kernel which offers good operation for audio applications at lower latencies, lower than the human perception threshold. The time that elapses between a hardware device issuing a hardware interrupt, and the time the process that deals with it is run is known as latency. Linux can be set up well to handle realtime, low-latency audio.

• Whether you are an amateur musician or just a student recording his professor, you need to edit and work with audio recordings. If for a long time such task was exclusively attributed to Macintosh, this time is over, and Linux now has what it takes to do the job. In short, here is a non-exhaustive list of good audio editing software, fit for different tasks and needs.

• Over the last year, as part of the new enterprise services that IBM has been pushing om its reinvention, Watson has become less of a “Jeopardy”-winning gimmick and more of a tool. It also remains IBM’s proprietary creation.

• What are the chances, then, of creating a natural-language machine learning system on the order of Watson, albeit with open source components? To some degree, this has already happened — in part because Watson itself was built in top of existing open source work, and others have been developing similar systems in parallel to Watson. Here’s a look at four such projects.

• Neil Anderson re-joined Sopra last week as a Principal Open Source Architect for Scotland. This appointment will help us meet the growing demand for Open Source solutions both in Scotland and across the UK. Sopra has been leveraging Open Source software to deliver business solutions for many years and, whilst working with Open Standards, is delivering the flexibility, collaboration, sharing and “best of breed” solutions that the public sector demands.

• Few advancements in modern technology have taken the world by storm as much as open-source software (OSS). Once the domain of geeks, idealists, computer scientists and activists, OSS has become a mainstream fact of life and given rise to a plethora of operating systems, technologies and applications that are often taken for granted.

• However, becoming mainstream can sometimes mean a death sentence to a cause. All too often, “mainstream” becomes synonymous with “mundane.” And when something reaches that point, it often loses its appeal along with the very support that drove it to mainstream status.

• Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about one of the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects, with the rather disconcerting name of AllSeen. I found that problematic, since the AllSeen Alliance hopes to create the de facto standards for the much-hyped Internet of Things. One of the my chief concerns with this idea is that it could make today’s surveillance look positively restrained – imagine if spy agencies and general ne’er-do-wells had access to detailed knowledge about and perhaps even control over individual components of your “intelligent” home.

Events

• First, let me start off by thanking all of you in the open source software community for your tremendous support and help throughout my first year with the Open Source Initiative. It has been quite a transition for me, moving from the formality and conventionalism of institutions of higher education, to what in many ways feels like a start-up. I’m truly fortunate—the OSI and the open source software community are energetic, creative, smart and for me personally, motivational. I was honored to join the OSI in November 2013, thrilled to work with the Board and our members this year, and excited about the possibilities and opportunities in 2015.

• Last week I attended the Web Engines Hackfest. The event was sponsored by Igalia (also hosting the event), Adobe and Collabora.

• As usual I spent most of the time working on the WebKitGTK+ GStreamer backend and Sebastian Dröge kindly joined and helped out quite a bit, make sure to read his post about the event!

Web Browsers

Chrome

• One of the ways in which Google has been preserving the purity of its Chrome browser is to carefully police what kinds of extensions will work with it. In late 2013, Google decreed that the longstanding Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI), which extensions have worked with for many years, is the source of many problems. Google has also delivered an update on its plan to remove NPAPI from Chrome.

SaaS/Big Data

• Providing support for all 3 init systems (sysv-rc, Upstart and systemd) isn’t hard, and generating the init scripts / Upstart job / systemd using a template system is a lot easier than I previously thought.

• As always, when writing this kind of blog post, I do expect that others will not like what I did. But that’s the point: give me your opinion in a constructive way (please be polite even if you don’t like what you see… I had too many times had to read harsh comments), and I’ll implement your ideas if I find it nice.

BSD

• Tom Stellard of AMD released the LLVM 3.5.1-rc1 release prior to the weekend to solicit testing prior to officially putting out this first point release to LLVM 3.5. Stellard in large part continues to organize these point releases for yielding more frequent stable LLVM updates to help out users and distribution packagers in getting out AMD GPU LLVM back-end fixes and improvements.

• Among the legions of Linux users and admins, there seems to be a sort of passive curiosity about FreeBSD and other *BSDs. Like commuters on a packed train, they gaze out at a less crowded, vaguely mysterious train heading in a slightly different direction and wonder what traveling on that train might be like — for a moment. The few who cross over find themselves in a place that is equal parts familiar and foreign. And the strange parts can be scary.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The newest platform that the GNU Compiler Collection has been ported to is Visium. AdaCore is now looking to contribute their GCC Visium port to mainline.

• Never heard of Visium before? Neither have we, but it’s yet another platform where GCC can serve as the code compiler. Eric Botcazou of AdaCore explained Visium as “a 32-bit RISC architecture with an Extended Arithmetic Module implementing some 64-bit operations and an FPU designed for embedded systems…The Visium is a classic 32-bit RISC architecture whose branches have a delay slot and whose arithmetic and logical instructions all set the flags, and they comprise the moves between GP registers (which are inclusive ORs under the hood in the traditional RISC fashion).”

Public Services/Government

• The Justice Department’s first foray into the open data world with the launch of two APIs is noteworthy. But the underlying reason why DoJ could release the software code is really the story here.

• First, the APIs, or application programming interfaces, that Justice released are codes for Web developers to build mobile apps and other software more easily to find press releases and job openings.

• Nothing ground breaking in terms of APIs.

• Skip Bailey, a former chief information officer at the DoJ’s Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the APIs are part of how Justice is moving to open source platform, Drupal. And that, he said, is the big accomplishment.

Licensing

• The General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2) continues to be the most widely used and most important license for free and open source software. Black Duck Software estimates that 16 billion lines of code are licensed under GPLv2. Despite its importance, the GPLv2 has been the subject of very few court decisions, and virtually all of the most important terms of the GPLv2 have not been interpreted by courts.

Openness/Sharing

• Anyone concerned with security might be interested in a new open source entropy generator that has been created by Paul Campbell at Moonbase Otago called OneRNG.

Open Data

• Open Knowledge’s recent publication of the 2014 Open Data Index shows slow progress by governments in opening up key data. Overall the level of “open” is down to 11% from 15% a year ago.

Programming

• With the launch of Cargo and crates.io, Rust’s ecosystem has already seen significant expansion, but it still takes a lot of work to track Rust’s nightly releases. Beginning with the alpha release, and especially approaching beta1, this will change dramatically; code that works with beta1 should work with 1.0 final without any changes whatsoever.

• This migration into stability should be a boon for library writers, and we hope that by 1.0 final there will be a massive collection of crates ready for use on the stable channel – and ready for the droves of people trying out Rust for the first time.

• Python 2.x was supposed to be long gone by now. Instead, it’s getting security fixes to keep legacy users current.

• Now is the best time ever to be a software developer – in terms of employment, organizational impact, and the amazing breadth of tools and platforms available. The future seems even brighter: Over time, I’m betting software development will become the No. 1 technology priority for most enterprises.

• That might seem like an overreach, when today’s biggest enterprise technology budget items remain networking, storage, servers, and licensed software. But over the next 10 or 15 years, enterprises will move more and more of their operations to the cloud — and devote more and more resources to building and revising applications on those cloud platforms to differentiate their businesses.

Standards/Consortia

• Google says it is bringing better support for OpenDocumentFormat file types, like those used natively in open source office suites, to its cloud-based app platforms.

Leftovers

Security

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Canterbury Christ Church University says it refused to hand over list, and Green party councillor criticises police request

Censorship

• The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (Haia) has shut down 10,117 Twitter accounts during the year because of religious violations, its spokesman, Turki Al-Shulail, has revealed.

• “Their users were committing religious and ethical violations. Haia blocked and arrested some of their owners. However, it was hard to follow all the accounts due to the advanced security used in this kind of social media,” he told the media.

Civil Rights

• Straw has climbed down a bit from his days of power and glory, when he told the House of Commons, immediately after sacking me, that there was no such thing as the CIA extraordinary rendition programme and its existence was “Mr Murray’s opinion.” He no longer claims it did not exist and he no longer claims I am a fantasist. He now merely claims he was not breaking the law.

• His claim of respect for the law is a bit dubious in the light of Sir Michael Wood’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry. Wood said that as Foreign Office Legal Adviser, he and his elite team of in-house FCO international lawyers unanimously advised Straw the invasion of Iraq would be an illegal war of aggression. Straw’s response? He wrote to the Attorney General requesting that Sir Michael be dismissed and replaced. And forced Goldsmith to troop out to Washington and get alternative advice from Bush’s nutjob Republican neo-con lawyers.

• Of course NPR did not ban the word “torture”–but it did, according to ombud Alicia Shepard (6/21/09) a few months earlier, decide “to not use the term ‘torture’ to describe techniques such as waterboarding but instead [use] ‘harsh interrogation tactics,’” because “the role of a news organization is not to choose sides in this or any debate.”

• Twenty-six innocent people have been tortured by the CIA. These were people who had literally nothing to hide, but they had something to fear anyway. Civil liberties are either applied to everybody without exception, or will be reliable for nobody.

• Police aggressively questioned the tearful girlfriend of a young black man they had just shot dead as he held a BB gun in an Ohio supermarket – accusing her of lying, threatening her with jail, and suggesting that she was high on drugs.

• Tasha Thomas was reduced to swearing on the lives of her relatives that John Crawford III had not been carrying a firearm when they entered the Walmart in Beavercreek, near Dayton, to buy crackers, marshmallows and chocolate bars on the evening of 5 August.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Sony Pictures has demanded that news organisations stop reporting on the information stolen by hackers in the crippling attack on the studio.

• The demand was sent to media companies in a three-page letter written by Sony Pictures’ lawyers Boies, Schiller & Flexner after a wave of highly embarrassing data releases by hackers.

• “Sony Pictures Entertainment does not consent to your possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading or making any use of the stolen information,” the letter read.

• The Pirate Bay crew has broken its silence for the first time since the site was knocked down hard by a raid in Sweden last week. The people behind the site are still considering their options and have no concrete comeback plans yet. Nevertheless, they encourage the public to keep the Kopimi spirit alive.

• The Pirate Bay was shut down this week. Whether or not it resurfaces, that event has already triggered a wave of innovation that will spawn exciting new sharing technologies over the coming years, just like when Napster was shut down fifteen years ago

• Okay, it’s no secret that the MPAA hates Google. It doesn’t take a psychology expert to figure that out. But in the last few days, some of the leaks from the Sony Pictures hack have revealed the depths of that hatred, raising serious questions about how the MPAA abuses the legal process in corrupt and dangerous ways. The most serious charge — unfortunately completely buried by this report at The Verge — is that it appears the MPAA and the major Hollywood studios directly funded various state Attorneys General in their efforts to attack and shame Google. Think about that for a second.

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