● 12.19.14

● Links 19/12/2014: Robolinux 7.7.1 LXDE, Red Hat Thriving

Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• You can tell it’s the holiday season — a lot of people are focusing more on the guy with the red suit who looks quite a bit like Jon ‘maddog’ Hall than they are on digital matters. This also is the time of year, naturally, where pundits make their predictions for the following year.

• However, I should admit something here. Truth in advertising: I don’t have a good record in predicting the future. I have a hard enough time predicting what to wear the following day — oh, right: clothes. But Linux and FOSS being, well, Linux and FOSS, these projections are as good as any prediction now being foisted on the FOSS public by the army of digital pundits out there.

• So what’s going to happen in 2015?

• They put GNU/Linux on those PCs although they could have used that other OS and they found they saved money. The PCs are easy to manage thanks to FLOSS package-management. They were in total control of the PCs because it’s FLOSS, not code designed by some corporate salesmen, but folks who make software that works for the user. That’s been my experience in schools. That’s the experience of other folks who use GNU/Linux in the real world.

Desktop

• The last few years has been some kind of a tipping point. Most OEMs are shipping some GNU/Linux units. Many retailers sell them to consumers. European governments are getting behind a move to accept FLOSS and GNU/Linux for purchases. China, India, Russia, Brazil, and several other governments have committed to FLOSS. The preferences for that other OS and its way of doing things are dying. Many schools run GNU/Linux because it is very affordable and their graduates are filling a demand for an educated workforce. Android/Linux is thriving. There’s no reason GNU/Linux cannot as well. It is better suited to run on legacy PCs than Android/Linux. Large screens matter. Mice and keyboards matter. GNU/Linux works very well with them and the performance continues to improve.

• Linux laptops are available from major computer OEMs such as Dell and Lenovo and specialized Linux vendors such as System76 and ZaReason, but the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which would prefer it if I referred to Linux as GNU/Linux, doesn’t approve of any of them thanks to their use of proprietary firmware. That may not continue to be the case.

• You may be rolling an obscure flavor of Linux on your new laptop and sporting a Free Software Foundation bumper sticker on your bio-diesel powered V-Dub, but chances are your open-source laptop isn’t really that “free,” thanks to closed firmware binaries hidden deep inside hardware itself.

Server

• “We made a very conscious effort with Docker to insert the technology into an existing toolbox. We did not want to turn the developer’s world upside down on the first day. … We showed them incremental improvements so that over time the developers discovered more things they could do with Docker. So the developers could transition into the new architecture using the new tools at their own pace.”

• In 2014, the widespread interest in creating a platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) was evident across all sectors. NFV is moving out of the labs and into the field. A recent study by Infonetics predicts that the SDN and NFV markets are expected to exceed $11 billion by 2018. We’re excited to see the industry embrace open source as the way to bring NFV to market faster.

Applications

• This is going to be a sort of long post, but it’s filled with screenshots. I hope you enjoy keeping track of Builder as much as I enjoy creating it.

Games

• Hearthlands is the fantastic looking city builder in early access that we took a look at recently, and it is now on Steam.

• Torchlight II is an action hack-and-slash title developed and published by Runic Games on Steam and it looks like it’s getting closer to a Linux release.

• Thanks to our supporter, FutureSuture, we have word that Endless Legend will still come to Linux, but it has suffered delays.

• Screwfly Studios second game ‘Deadnaut’ is looking to come to Linux, but their new Linux demo needs some testing and feedback first. Get to work people!

• For those that don’t remember Screwfly Studios are the awesome dudes behind Zafehouse: Diaries which sadly isn’t on Linux, so be sure to give them a warm welcome with their new game!

• Aspyr Media have done it again! Civilization: Beyond Earth is now officially available for Linux, and we have keys to throw through the screen.

• As expected after the announcement earlier this week, the highly anticipated Civilization: Beyond Earth game is now officially available for Linux and SteamOS.

• January is usually a quiet year and sometimes people want something fresh instead of going through their Pile of Shame. So if that description fits you, then the digital recreation of Warhammer Quest might take your fancy.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The WTFTW project is an X tiling window manager written in Rust. The WTFTW name is short for Window Tiling For The Win. WTFTW is written against the latest Rust nightly code, with Rust 1.0 approaching next year. This tiling window manager can be easily tested in Xnest or Xephyr.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The digiKam Team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.6.0. This release includes many bugs fixes in Image Editor and Batch Queue Mananger. Thanks to Maik Qualmann and Jan Wolter to propose patches in KDE bugzilla.

• See the new list of the issues closed in digiKam 4.6.0 available through the KDE Bugs-tracking System.

• Qt 5.4 was released just last week! The new release comes right on schedule (following the 6-months development cycle of the Qt 5 series), and brings a huge number of new features.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A new GTK+ theme called Paper is being designed right now and it looks like it’s already a winner, even if it hasn’t been finished.

Distributions

New Releases

• Robolinux 7.7.1, a fast and easy-to-use Linux distribution based on Debian has just received a new desktop environment, LXDE, making this the third second flavor of the distribution.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc, the world’s largest commercial distributor of the Linux operating system, posted a 15 percent rise in quarterly revenue, helped by strong growth in subscriptions.

• Red Hat’s CFO boasted the software company has achieved sequential revenue growth every quarter for the last 51 straight quarters.

• No doubt Red Hat dominated the headlines today with their 3Q financial report and subsequent quotes. They’re also having to say goodbye to CFO Charlie Peters as their stocks jumped 10 percent in after hours trading following the report. In other Red Hat news, a security bulletin from the Open Source software company said that latest security scare “Grinch” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CFO Charlie Peters, at the open-source giant since 2004, is retiring.

• The 63-year-old made the official announcement personally during the third quarter earnings call Thursday, though he notified the company Dec. 16.

Fedora

• Following a fiscal Q3 report this afternoon by open-source distributor Red Hat (RHT) that was better than expected, and a forecast for this quarter slightly less than consensus, CEO Jim Whitehurst was kind enough to spend a few minutes talking with me by phone.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Quick update for Ubuntu users planning to use Ubuntu 15.04: GTK 3.14 has landed in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet. And of course, the default Ubuntu themes, Ambiance and Radiance, have been updated with GTK 3.14 support.

• Furthermore, Nautilus, an application that wasn’t updated in quite a while and was still at version 3.10, has been updated to version 3.14:

• While Ubuntu itself no longer puts out alpha/beta releases in favor of just testing out the daily Live ISOs, the various Ubuntu flavors still participating in the traditional release process have done their first alpha releases this afternoon for Ubuntu 15.04.

• If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably heard about this new thing from Canonical called “Snappy” Ubuntu Core, but at the same time trying to understand exactly what it is may leave you cross-eyed, especially with the buzzwords such as “cloud”, “containers” and “apps” floating about. Once you get a handle on it, it’s obvious that Canonical’s new baby isn’t terribly useful for those of us who are simply users, but perhaps it provides an interesting preview of what could come to the desktop version of Ubuntu in the future.

• China Mobile and Canonical have launched the ‘Ubuntu Developer Innovation Contest’ to engage developers “with the next generation of mobile experiences on Ubuntu – which don’t revolve around apps and the app icon grid”.

• Contest submissions can include Scopes and Apps (HTML5 and QML native), and finalists will be selected for two tracks – student and independent developers.

• The first Ubuntu Phone will go on sale in Europe in the second week of February.

Flavours and Variants

• The first Alpha of Vivid (to become 15.04) has now been released!

Devices/Embedded

• LG’s attempt to resurrect webOS for smart TVs is entering a new phase at CES 2015. A wide range of webOS 2.0 TVs will be displayed in Vegas, and LG is focusing on performance; the company says that starting the YouTube app from the home screen is 70 percent faster, for example, and overall boot times should be up to 60 percent quicker.

Phones

• The tenth update to Jolla’s Sailfish mobile operating system is now available. This update is version 1.1.1.26 and is codenamed Vaarainjärvi.

Tizen

• The application Quick Notes was created by Application Developer Piotr Walczuk. The idea behind the app is to have the ablity to write down handwritten notes on your wrist, anywhere (well almost), and is available for the Samsung Gear / Gear 2 and Gear S Tizen Smart watches.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Some dreams die hard. After the KDE-based Vivaldi tablet failed to appear after three years of anticipation, Jolla is planning a free software tablet of its own. The product is off to a roaring start, having just raised $1,824,055 in its crowdfunding campaign– almost five times the original target. So, this time, we might actually see some hardware.

• Mind you, whether the tablet will satisfy everyone remains open to doubt. Although Jolla is talking loudly about being “people powered” and listening to want users want, some requests, especially for hardware, may be impossible to fulfill. The manufacturing capacity of advanced features is limited world-wide, and monopolized by large companies like Apple and Samsung.

• More importantly, exactly how free the tablet will be has yet to be announced.

Free Software/Open Source

• I’ve been a software engineer for almost 15 years now, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, I’ve been working with open source software from the get-go. From basic GNU command line utilities to C compilers, open source was there from the start.

• Even though my professional focus has changed over the years, in one form or another I’ve been living in a open source ecosystem—be it the operating system I used, the libraries I worked with, or even the integrated development environment (IDE) I used on a daily basis. Despite that, it never occurred to me to contribute to open source software until I joined Red Hat three years ago and began working on oVirt, an open source data center virtualization project.

• Are you using open source software for free? Do you wish you could contribute, but don’t have the time to learn how a new developer community works?

• Giving cash donations is not necessarily the best way to give back to an open source community. Instead, try channeling any frustration you may feel with open source software and help with testing. It’s good for your blood pressure and good for the rest of the users of the code!

• The administration of France’s Eure-et-Loir Department has implemented Nuxeo, an open source enterprise document and content management system. The solution is used to exchange documents between the department’s services and, sometime next year, also with partner-organisations.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Recently Firefox started refusing to run flash, including youtube videos (about the only flash I run).

SaaS/Big Data

• Last week was a momentous one for Hortonworks, which focuses on the Hadoop Big Data platform. The company had a successful IPO, driving home how focused many enterprises are on yielding more useful insights from their troves of data than standard data mining tools can provide.

• Nebula, which bills itself as an enterprise private cloud company and is focused on OpenStack, is not exactly just another player in the OpenStack ecosystem. The company is funded by noted backers Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Comcast Ventures, but even more notably, the company was founded by Chris Kemp, who helped launch OpenStack back when he was NASA’s CTO.

• OpenStack cloud vendor Nebula, led by a former NASA CTO, provides new deployment, management and monitoring tools.

• Apparently there has been some confusion about the integrated release cycle, how things are included and what that means for the complexity of OpenStack deployments.

Databases

• Version 9.4 of the PostgreSQL relational database management system is out. “This release adds many new features which enhance PostgreSQL’s flexibility, scalability and performance for many different types of database users, including improvements to JSON support, replication and index performance.”

• The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces the release of PostgreSQL 9.4, the latest version of the world’s leading open source database system. This release adds many new features which enhance PostgreSQL’s flexibility, scalability and performance for many different types of database users, including improvements to JSON support, replication and index performance.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3.5, the famous open source office suite, making this the most advance stable version available.

CMS

• WordPress 4.1 is out and one of its new features is a revised “distraction free writing mode.” I seem to remember that it had something like this before, but it was not as well implemented as it is in WordPress 4.1. Now, when you push the distraction free writing mode button, everything else fades away except what you need to write your post.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Given all the options and varying needs of stores, there is no right or wrong answer. Keep in mind that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Having said that, stores seeking the greatest bang for the buck (as in sales generated to investment spent), and those seeking the most flexibility for growth in the future, should highly consider open source for their ecommerce engine.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We say that running free software on your computer means that its operation is under your control. Implicitly this presupposes that your computer will do what your programs tell it to do, and no more. In other words, that your computer will be loyal to you.

• In 1990 we took that for granted; nowadays, many computers are designed to be disloyal to their users. It has become necessary to spell out what it means for your computer to be a loyal platform that obeys your decisions, which you express by telling it to run certain programs.

• Well, I just want to share the progress in the development of FisicaLab. As you know I want a module for thermodynamics in version 0.4.0. This means that FisicaLab needs the ability to handle data from steam tables.

Public Services/Government

• Researchers at federal defense and energy laboratories are open sourcing some of the electronics and software for two advanced ambulatory robots in hopes of boosting their ability to handle perilous situations.

• In a Dec. 16 announcement, the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratories said it is developing more energy-efficient motors to dramatically improve the endurance of legged robots performing the types of motions that are crucial in disaster response situations. The project is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Openness/Sharing

• Openpump, an open-source syringe pump made to dispense fluids over a set period of time, is just like the syringe pumps used to administer medication in hospitals and laboratory environments.

Programming

• It’s been a long, long time since Google came up with the foundational technologies for storing and processing big data. This year, the company developed a new tool for working with data as it comes in, and now Google is keen to see people use it.

• Google is looking to woo cloud developers once again with the debut of an open source for Java based around its fairly new Cloud Dataflow service.

Standards/Consortia

• Building on the 31 July 2014 announcement of the W3C Social Web Working Group, the OpenSocial Foundation and W3C today announce the transfer of OpenSocial specifications and assets to the W3C. As of 1 January 2015, OpenSocial Foundation will close and future work will take place within the W3C Social Web Activity, chartered to make it easier to build and integrate social applications into the Open Web Platform.

• Google, in a surprise move, today announced support for ODF (Open Document Format) in its products.

• I remember the days when I had to sheepishly asked people who wanted to share files with me to go back to .doc or .docx as none of the Google properties would talk to ODF files. That was quite embarrassing because I invested a lot of time in liberating those people from Microsoft’s vendor-locked file formats.

Leftovers

Security

• A critical Git security vulnerability has been announced today, affecting all versions of the official Git client and all related software that interacts with Git repositories, including GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac. Because this is a client-side only vulnerability, github.com and GitHub Enterprise are not directly affected.

• Today’s Git vulnerability affects those using the Git client on case-insensitive file-systems. On case-insensitive platforms like Windows and OS X, committing to .Git/config could overwrite the user’s .git/config and could lead to arbitrary code execution. Fortunately with most Phoronix readers out there running Linux, this isn’t an issue thanks to case-sensitive file-systems.

• Google has taken several steps this week to improve the security of its Gmail application and Chrome web browser. Gmail is set to support Content Security Policy (CSP) and has also published preliminary code for end-to-end email encryption.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• I suppose you could argue that Cuba was a threat to the United States during 1962′s Cuban missile crisis–which was very long ago indeed. I’m more struck by Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Greg Jaffe’s little geography lesson, comparing Cuba to a “flyspeck”–or, in other words, insect excrement.

• Cuba, as it happens, is 42,426 square miles in area–making it bigger than Iceland or Ireland, neither of which would probably like to be compared to fly poop.

Privacy

• I mean, your browser is one big catcher’s mit and absorbs everything it sees in an attempt to execute instructions sent from a remote web server.

Civil Rights

• A corrupt Greater Manchester Police has been jailed after accessing police computer systems and passing on confidential information.

• Pc Katie Murray (born 22/04/1984) of Dunkirk Street, Droylsden was found guilty of two counts of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office and one count of breaching the Data Protection Act. She was jailed for two years and nine months.

• The information was passed on to her sister Lyndsey Murray, (born 10/05/1981) of Ruskin Road, Droylsden, and former partner, Jason Lloyd, (born 20/11/1970) of Peregrine Close, Droylsden, who were both found guilty of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office. Lynsey Murray was jailed for six months.

• If the history of this century has been about anything so far, then it is the bargain of national security. A constant state of war carried out on a need-to-know basis.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Title II gives the Federal Communications Commission power to regulate telecommunications providers as utilities or “common carriers.” Like landline phone providers, common carriers must offer service to the public on reasonable terms. To regulate Internet service providers (ISPs) as utilities, the FCC must reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, a move that consumer advocacy groups and even President Obama have pushed the FCC to take.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Google’s motto “do no evil” never meant that much. Google always did what it had to do for its own benefit, but it was seen as — and arguably was — a company changing the world for the better. Now it appears that governments around the world are taking the position that Google can’t do anything right.

• Sony may have withdrawn The Interview but not everyone is scared of releasing the movie. Author Paulo Coelho, whose book The Alchemist has sold in excess of 165 million copies, has just offered to buy the rights to the movie from Sony. He informs TorrentFreak that it would go straight on BitTorrent, for free.

• While the BitTorrent ecosystem is filled with uncertainty and doubt, researchers at Delft University of Technology have released the first version of their anonymous and decentralized BitTorrent network. “Tribler makes BitTorrent anonymous and impossible to shut down,” lead researcher Prof. Pouwelse says.

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