● 03.17.15

● Links 17/3/2015: Linux 4.0 RC4, Calligra and Krita 2.9.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 2:31 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Dell has offered a Linux (Ubuntu) option on some laptops (and servers) for a few years now. Considering my general love for all things Linux, combined with my (often) overpowering desire to play with new hardware, it’s rather odd that I’ve never gotten my hands on a Linux-powered Dell laptop.

• That rather egregious offense has now been remedied.

• Right in front of me sits the Dell M3800 Mobile Workstation – a 15.6-inch laptop that doubles as a Linux-powered desktop replacement.

• Panic was starting to creep in, and was pushing the anger level even higher. ‘OK, run gparted and see exactly what Windows has done to me,’ I thought. And…nothing. Empty. The entire hard drive was unallocated space.

• Time to rant. Microsoft, I hate you! I hope that each and every one of you is condemned to an endless purgatory of trying to recover corrupted Windows systems!

• OK, with that rant out of the way, what to do? The prospect of installing Windows from scratch was unappealing beyond description.

• On top of that, even if I got it installed and running again, I would have to go through the fight to get UEFI boot configured to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and that in itself is a basically never-ending struggle because Windows keeps trying to ‘reclaim’ first boot.

• The more people discover the wonders of GNU/Linux, the faster that desktop monopoly sinks.

Server

• Oracle has released a new secure-boot version of its Linux, but the new issuance is attracting criticism that it’s not actually secure.

• And since nobody is still able to compile things from scratch, everybody just downloads precompiled binaries from random websites. Often without any authentication or signature.

• NSA and virus heaven. You don’t need to exploit any security hole anymore. Just make an “app” or “VM” or “Docker” image, and have people load your malicious binary to their network.

Kernel Space

• A few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing the fourth Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming and highly anticipated Linux 4.0 kernel. According to Linus, Linux kernel 4.0 RC4 is a small release that includes many driver updates and ARM changes.

• On the other hand, I was also heartened by what does not appear in the above paragraph. There is no assertion that the Linux kernel community’s processes are perfect, which is all to the good, because delusions of perfection all too often prevent progress in mature projects. In fact, in this imperfect world, there is nothing so good that it cannot be made better. On the other hand, there also is nothing so bad that it cannot be made worse, so random wholesale changes should be tested somewhere before being applied globally to a project as important as the Linux kernel. I was therefore quite happy to read the last part of this paragraph: “we do not want to do anything to cause the quality of submission and eventual result to ever decrease.”

• The challenge is to take the v3.19 Linux kernel code implementing Tiny RCU, unmodified, and use some formal-verification tool to prove that its grace periods are correctly implemented.

Benchmarks/Performance

• The ext4 filesystem causes a number of scaling and performance issues which Jan Kara, Linux kernel engineer at SUSE, addressed in his presentation at The Linux Foundation’s Vault storage conference last week.

• Ext4 represents the latest evolution of the most-used Linux filesystem, ext3. In that regard, ext4 can be considered a deeper improvement over ext3 than ext3 was over ext2. (Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to ext2.)

Applications

• The GNOME development team announced recently the immediate availability for download and update of the second maintenance release of Evince document viewer for their GNOME 3.14 desktop environment. Evince 3.14.2 is a mainly a bugfix release that repairs several issues discovered in the previous version of the software.

• Qomp (Quick Online Music Player) is a minimal music player written in Qt, with a basic interface, support for local files and online music streams.

• ownCloud, through Klaas Freitag, has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming ownCloud Client 1.8 for all supported computer operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• flareGet, a full-featured, advanced, multi-threaded, multi-segment download manager and accelerator for Linux and other platforms, has received an update and quite a few fixes.

• HomeBank is a free, open source, personal finance and money management application that can be used to manage your daily and monthly finance details easily as well as effectively. It has built-in powerful filtering tools and graphs that will help you to analyze your everyday transactions. It is a cross platform tool which will work on almost all common devices and operating systems, including Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.

• Almost a month ago, we announced the release of Nautilus (Files) 3.16 Beta 1, which brought various fixes and improvements to the default file manager application of the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop environment. Today, we announce the second Beta release of Nautilus 3.16.

• The third maintenance release of the stable Git 2.3 branch has been released bringing several bug fixes and performance improvements to the world’s most popular distributed revision control system that lets developers interact with GitHub to upload the source code of their programs.

• Mounting volumes from the console, without the need for background daemons or automounting tools, has been near the forefront of my Linux experience for years now. If it makes any difference, I’ve tried other options but still rely on mostly the same solution and setup that I did eight years ago.

• It should be fairly obvious what’s happening there: logintop10 parses through your wtmp file (which was at /var/log/wtmp on my Arch system) and comes back with an array of login statistics. Output is to an HTML file of your choosing, with very clean formatting and with a little color here and there.

• Make ASCII art, talk to your computer and play text adventures. Your Linux command line isn’t just for work: it can be weirdly entertaining, if you know the right commands.

• Since there is still no official version for Linux, many apps are trying to be Evernote alternatives, more or less successfully. Although it’s possible to run Evernote in Wine, it’s a good idea to find a native note-taking app for Linux that suits your needs.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Windows

• The Linux community is one full of passion. From the outside it may seem strange why a small percentage of people around the world care so much about an operating system, after all it’s merely a tool or set of tools used to complete certain tasks.

Games

• The Hero of Kendrickstone is a single-player interactive, text-based novel game launched on Steam on March 13, in which you have to save the city of Kendrickstone from an evil wizard.

• Last week we celebrated 1000 games on Steam for Linux. But as Liam says, quality is more important than quantity. So I took a look at game no. 1000: Parallax.

• I’ve messed with the open source Nouveau driver once in a while but recently I decided I’d like to properly test how well Nouveau would be able to handle my day-to-day computer activities.

• It’s no secret that a lot of people are impatiently waiting for the promised Linux port of Divinity: Original Sin, but we have a little more insight as to why now.

• Bundle Stars do have some really sweet deals now and then, and the Crimson Bundle is certainly one of them.

• It will release for Linux at the same time as Windows thanks to Aspyr Media, and it now has a trailer.

• It looks like yet another bigger game is heading to Linux, and it’s Spec Ops: The Line this time! A Third-Person modern military Shooter designed to challenge players’ morality by putting them in the middle of unspeakable situations.

• A petition aimed at Blizzard, which was asking for Linux support, has gathered a lot of attention from the Linux community, but not for the important answer from Blizzard’s CEO. The author of the petition made the stupidest and most uncalled-for comments following Mike Morhaime’s response.

• Age of Wonders III, a turn-based fantasy strategy developed and published by Triumph Studios, will arrive on the Linux platform.

• Sentinels of the Multiverse is quite a fun looking title that was ported to Linux last month, and sadly it got buried in my growing inbox.

• Nightside is a traditional real time strategy game, so you build a base, gather resources and finally, you assemble your army to conquer your foes.

• Aspyr Media have confirmed it will all launch on Windows, Mac and Linux together! Good to see them keeping up with the DLC.

• Dying Light is an FPS developed and published by Techland on Steam for Linux. The makers of the game have just released a new patch that comes with some important performance improvements.

• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has been a great success on the Linux platform, especially since it was released alongside all the other platforms. Now the latest DLC announced will be made available on Steam for Linux as well.

• Velocity 2X is a great looking shoot em up that was previously only on Sony consoles, and now FuturLab is teaming up with Sierra to bring it to other platforms, and that includes us too!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Qactus, a Qt-based OBS notifier, is out in the wild. Version 0.4.0 is the first release.

• Over the last weeks I concentrated my KWin related work on trying to integrate the Xwayland server properly. Xwayland is an interesting step on the way to Wayland as it maps X11 windows to Wayland surfaces. But it also needs an X11 window manager to manage the X11 windows. Overall it allows us to start integrating Wayland into the compositor without too much breakage. It’s still X11 after all, so our existing code base continues to work. And gruadually functionality can be replaced with the Wayland equivalent, so that we can afterwards start integrating proper Wayland clients.

• Macaw-Movies is a movie collection manager. It is now about to be in the KDE Family! And that’s really awesome.

• It can show the IBus panel icon in KDE5. KDE5 no longer enables notification area by default so this version communicates with KNotification via DBus instead of GtkStatusIcon.

• Below is a screenshot of MuseScore 2.0, which will be released very soon.

• So we met the freeze deadline to get our port to KF5 released with KDE Apps.

• What does it change? you have a changelog, but it doesn’t explain what’s behind.

• Being based on KF5 makes Kdenlive future-proof and opens doors for potential new horizons (platforms, design)…

• The Calligra development team, through Cyrille Berger, has announced earlier today, March 15, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first maintenance release of the Calligra 2.9 office suite for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• The Calligra team has released version 2.9.1, the first of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite in the 2.9 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.9.0 and we recommend everybody to update.

• I improved kdebugsettings (and increased version to 0.3).

• The first bugfix release for Krita 2.9 is out! There are now builds for Windows, OSX and CentOS 6 available. While bug fixing is going on unabated, Dmitry has started working on the Photoshop layer style Kickstarter feature, too: drop shadows already work, and the rest of the layer styles are coming.The goal is to have this feature done for Krita 2.9.2, which should be out next month. And we’re working on a new Kickstarter project!

• Krita really is more focused to creating images from scratch without being chained to imitating traditional media as close to possible. I’ve tried quite a few programs, but Krita is the program that works the best for me, maybe because I like both traditional and digital media.

• I like cinema and I like to draw motion pictures. I do not like very much to draw static pictures but I can. I studied traditional painting for eight years in the art school and after that I’ve continued to do it myself for 36 years. I like to learn painting even more than to paint.

• The idea came when I was browsing the Krita forums in search of a drawing challenge and the only thing that came up was on Facebook. Not everybody has or wants Facebook, so we’ll have this challenge on the forum.

• During the past few years at Gluon Project we chose to adopt OCS (Open Collaboration Services) protocol in our distribution system, developing a minimal and working server and client that works on GamingFreedom.org. Gluon, however, never went into full production so people couldn’t test our infrastructure and the distribution system never went above the “experimental phase”.

• It has been quite some time since we asked you to share your experiences with Virtual Desktops and Activities. Meanwhile we have been thinking through the enormous amount of feedback you provided. It was very inspiring. Thanks a lot for contributing!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I’ve been hacking the gtk3 vclplug for LibreOffice recently, here’s the before image after scrolling up and down a few times. UI font not rendered the same as the rest of the desktop, bit droppings everywhere, text missing from style listbox, mouse-wheel non-functional

Distributions

New Releases

• The LXLE team has announced earlier today, March 11, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta versions LXLE 14.04.2 and 12.04.5 SMS Editions, introducing UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support in the 64-bit ISO images. The distribution also switches to SeaMonkey as the default web browser.

• John Martinson has announced recently the immediate availability for download and testing of the third maintenance release of its Robolinux 7.8 Linux distribution, which now features new powerful security and privacy applications designed with a single goal in mind, to keep users safe at all times, online and offline.

Screenshots

Arch Family

• The Manjaro development team was proud to announce today, March 13, the immediate availability for update of a new Manjaro Update Pack, dated 2015-03-13 (stable). This is the fourth update to the Manjaro Linux 0.8.12 computer operating system, and it brings exciting features and performance improvements.

• One day after announcing the fourth update for Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, the Manjaro developers released the fourth Preview version of the upcoming Manjaro Linux Xfce 0.9.0 and Manjaro Linux KDE 0.9.0 distributions. The Xfce edition comes now with a tweaked and patched Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, promising the best Xfce experience possible.

Slackware Family

• Seven months after the VideoLAN team released version 2.1.5 of their VLC player, we are treated to two new releases. There is a version 2.1.6 bugfix release, but that is not really getting attention. Everybody’s eyes are focused on the brand new 2.2.0 release. For the first time in the history of the VideoLAN Client, nowadays better known as the VLC player, there are simultaneous releases for most Operating Systems, including Android, iOS, Windows RT and Windows Phone. Of course there’s a release for Linux too (ok… and Windows) so I built you all some packages for Slackware (compatible with 14.1 and -current).

Red Hat Family

• In the past Red Hat Product Security assigned weakness IDs only to vulnerabilities that meet certain criteria, more precisely, only vulnerabilities with CVSS score higher than 7. Since the number of incoming vulnerabilities was high, this filtering allowed us to focus on vulnerabilities that matter most. However, it also makes statistics incomplete, missing low and moderate vulnerabilities.

• So I’ve still been working on the virgil3d project along with part time help from Marc-Andre and Gerd at Red Hat, and we’ve been making steady progress. This post is about a test harness I just finished developing for adding and debugging GL features.

• That’s the latest plan put forward by the folks in Raleigh, as Red Hat unveils three new products — two of them software, one a partner program — intended to put the company at the center of all matters container-related.

Fedora

• Just tested the Fedora 22 Scientific Alpha RC3 image today with the test scripts/programs.

• Design Suite Alpha 22 is available for downloading along the Workstation edition of Fedora 22 Alpha which is based.

• The spins includes plugins for both Gimp (Gmic), Inkscape (support of making tables) and Blender (LuxRender). Shutter, a screenshot tool for desktop, is added at the request of Design Team.

Debian Family

• My name’s Neil, I’ve been involved with Debian for over 10 years now. I’ve held a variety of roles, from the SPI board, writing policy and secure testing team, to being one of the Release Managers for Squeeze and Wheezy.

• Earlier today, I posted a mail to debian-devel about how approximately 25 RC bugs affecting Jessie have been unblocked. As mentioned, I planned to age some of them. The expected result is that about 18 of them will migrate tonight and the remaining 7 of them will migrate tomorrow night.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu MATE 15.04 comes with a very interesting application that allows user to color the newly created folders and to even assign a small number of symbols to it.

• The default Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet wallpaper was revealed a few minutes ago.

• This change affects Ubuntu desktop (and all Ubuntu desktop flavors) and cloud/autopkgtests (snappy was already using systemd) but not Ubuntu Touch.

• According to Martin Pitt’s announcement, Ubuntu Touch can’t use systemd yet because most platforms currently run an ancient 3.4 kernel and “there’s some porting work to do on the upstart jobs”.

• Canonical revealed that a number of Oxide vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in its Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 operating system

• Ubuntu Vivid Vervet 15.04 is on its final approach to release at the end of next month. Here is a highlight of one of the features that I have helped to land.

Flavours and Variants

• At the request of a single user, Martin Wimpress, the developer of the famous Ubuntu MATE Linux operating system modified the donation page of the distribution by adding support for Bitcoin donations, which means that you can now donate Bitcoins to the project.

• I had long been attracted to the idea of using Linux. When Microsoft ceased to provide security patches for XP I got an excellent independent computer shop to install Lubuntu on my netbook for me. This allowed me to get used to the ways of Linux, and experiment with different programs. Any fears I may have had regarding ease of use were soon forgotten, and despite my experimentation, installing and uninstalling lots of programs, the system remained far more responsive than XP.

• What do you do when the default Bluetooth confirmation utility is less than ideal for your users? Why you dive in and improve it! This is Linux after all!

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi is nothing short of a revolution. This credit-card-sized, $35 computer has created an entire breed of makers and enthusiasts who are doing amazing things with this device. The device is developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation which was established by the technical director and ASIC architect for Broadcom, Eben Upton in May 2009.

Phones

Android

• USB Type-C, featured on Apple’s new MacBook and Google’s new Chromebook Pixel, is coming to Android phones. In a video from Google which goes over the benefits of USB Type-C, product manager Adam Rodriguez states that the company is very committed to the new spec, and that upcoming Chromebooks and Android phones will see it in the near future.

• Sony officially announced that the Lollipop update for both the Xperia Z3 and the Xperia Z3 Compact is indeed rolling out as we speak.

• While Samsung, HTC, and LG were updating a fair amount of their top-end smartphones with Android 5.0 Lollipop, Sony took its time and did not release a firmware refreshment for its top-end devices. Well, it might be late for the Lollipop party, but this doesn’t mean that it’s not attending at all.

• For all you Android Lollipop users out there, Google just began pushing out its first major update to its Material Design-dressed OS, and unlike some updates that are usually just for “stability and performance,” Android 5.1 actually comes with some stuff you’re definitely going to want to know about.

• Recently, a “leak” popped up and rekindled the hopes of all those fans that swear by the name of Nokia. A device named “Nokia 1100″ (an obvious nod to one of Nokia’s most successful phones ever) was caught in a benchmarks website, bringing Android 5.0 and a MediaTek chipset in tow. The device was claimed to be bound for 2016 (when Nokia can once again put its name on a smartphone).

• Sony has started rolling out the Android 5.0 Lollipop update for the Xperia Z3 and Xperia Z3 Compact in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

• IBM is entering the tablet market — sort of. The company plans to sell a modified Samsung Android tablet this summer with extra security capabilities, aimed at government users.

• Lookback — a user testing app that was co-founded in Sweden first as a side project by Spotify engineers before striking out on its own with funding from Index and others — has made its first acquisition: it has acquired a UK startup called Reissued, the company behind screencasting app QuickCast, which had 15,000 users and 500,000 screencasts recorded on its platform, from customers that include the likes of Twitter and Basecamp.

• Saving time is good. Free is good. Combine the two and you may have a winner. Here’s a list of assorted Android apps that deliver on both.

• The great thing about Android is that it never gets boring. You can tailor it exactly to your liking, making it feel completely different from one day to the next. If you get bored easily, it’s exactly the software for you. And it’s a big reason why Jon recently made the switch from his iPad mini to the Nexus 9.

• Google’s Material Design aesthetic is supposed to be the new standard for Android design, but not all apps have made the transition to the catchy new look.

• That tiny USB Type-C port you’ve seen on the latest MacBook and Chromebook Pixel? Don’t be surprised if you see it on your smartphone soon. In a video accompanying the new Chromebook, Google’s Adam Rodriguez says that his company is “very committed” to the new USB spec and that you’ll see it on both Android phones and more Chromebooks in the “near future.” It’s a vague promise, to be sure, but it’ll matter a lot in the long run. Type-C delivers brisk USB 3-level speeds (and eventually, 3.1) without requiring a gigantic connector, and the reversible design means you won’t have to inspect your phone to make sure you plug the cable in the right way.

• Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop mobile operating system update has officially been announced earlier this week, and the tech company’s flagship Nexus devices are already the first to roll out the patch, but with Motorola being a manufacturing partner on some Nexus devices, we can’t help but wonder when the Moto line will get the latest upgrade.

• Owners of Sony’s current flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z3, have been waiting patiently for the update to Android 5.0 Lollipop and it looks like the wait will finally be over next week.

• This week, Google announced the availability of Android 5.1, with multiple bug-fixes, security additions, and device protection in software. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Sony today has announced the rollout of the previous buggy Android 5.0 to its latest handsets, more than nine months after 5.0 was announced.

• Google’s decision to remove Silent Mode from the stock Android 5.0 Lollipop update left millions of people feeling perplexed and confused. The trusty Silent Mode was replaced with ‘No interruption’ mode, which flat out switched off all notifications on your phone – from alarms to the LED light. Now, Android 5.1 makes some amends by giving you more control over the Interruptions system, bringing it more in line with the Silent Mode of yore (and most other phones out there).

• We’ve heard a number of rumors about Google launching its own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), codenamed Nova. According to reports, the service will source wireless service from Sprint and T-Mobile, but it will rely on Wi-Fi networks to bear most of the weight of both data and voice services (though VoIP). While the details of this plan still aren’t clear, another piece of the puzzle just emerged that indicates Google is going to offer its own virtual private network (VPN) service, and it may be targeted specifically at Nova subscribers.

• If you like some granular control over synced accounts, you probably ran into a little roadblock with Android 5.0. If you wanted to manually sync items in one of your accounts, the button to do that was missing. Well, at least, sort of. In its place was “cancel sync,” even though there was nothing to cancel. That should have only been present after initiating a sync manually with the “sync now” option. None of that worked in 5.0. With Android 5.1, though, everything is back to normal.

• We’re back with a new installment of Android Authority this week after a two week hiatus for MWC. The show itself has been a blast, but we all had even more fun on the sidelines, just catching up with each other, meeting new people, and getting to hang out with fellow bloggers and journalists from the Android community. Check out a short gallery from the show here: it’s just a taste of an experience that we try to share with you at every show.

• On Android devices, the popularization of active display and imitators has basically negated the need for built-in LEDs. After all, what more can a blinking light tell you than a screen? Luckily, crafty developers are finding other uses for the neglected multicolored diodes. One app for Android, LED Music Effects, turns your device’s LEDs into a basic music visualizer.

• While mobile-app developers are concentrating their efforts on supporting Apple’s and Google’s mobile operating systems, one group hopes to make the Web a place for apps too.

• System optimization tools and apps are fairly popular on desktop PCs but also on mobile devices. They promise to free up space, memory or remove privacy-related information from the device they run on.

• And finally is the place where you can catch up with all the news blips that you wouldn’t have seen on the pages of Wareable yet. It’s a one-stop-shop for getting up to date with the little stories you may not be aware of.

• Earlier this week Google announced and released the highly anticipated Android 5.1 Lollipop update for most Nexus smartphones and tablets. However, the updates are slow to arrive for all users, and some may want to install Android 5.1 on the Nexus 6 right now. This guide will show you how to install the brand new Android 5.1 Lollipop update so that you can try out Google’s latest version of Android right now on your Nexus 6.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s hard to downplay the influence of open source software on the spectacular rise of data science. From my perspective as a technology consultant, open source isn’t just an interesting aspect of the data science revolution; it’s absolutely critical.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• For quite some time now, I’ve been following Rust, a new(ish) programming language by Mozilla. It’s been around for a while, but recently it’s been attracting a lot of buzz. Around the new year, I finally decided to take a deeper look into the language.

SaaS/Big Data

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is on a roll thus far in 2015, advancing many open source projects that are making a difference in the cloud and on the Big Data scene. Recently, we covered the advancement of Apache Drill to a top-level project. It is billed as “the world’s first schema-free SQL query engine that delivers real-time insights by removing the constraint of building and maintaining schemas before data can be analyzed.” We’ve also covered Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley

• Now, also on the data front, the ASF has announced the availability of Apache HBase v1.0, a distributed, scalable, database for Apache Hadoop and HDFS.

• Mirantis, focused on OpenStack, has announced a new initiative that integrates Kubernetes with OpenStack, letting developers deploy containers on OpenStack in what the company claims takes only minutes. The integration gives developers immediate access to Kubernetes clusters with Docker containers without needing to set up infrastructure. According to Mirantis, developers will be able to seamlessly move entire environments between OpenStack private clouds and public clouds that support Kubernetes, such as Google Cloud Platform.

• Last October, I wrote about a particular aspect of providing HA for workloads running on OpenStack. The HA problem space for OpenStack is much more broad than what was addressed there. There has been a lot of work around HA for the OpenStack services themselves. The problems for OpenStack services seem to be pretty well understood. There are reference architectures with detailed instructions available from vendors and distributions that have been integrated into deployment tools. The upstream OpenStack project also has an HA guide that covers this topic.

• Eucalyptus officially released support for AWS Cloudformation back in 4.0.0 but with the latest release of Eucalyptus i.e. 4.1.0 this support is now out of tech preview mode. What this means for the cloud users is that they can use Cloudformation just like they use it on AWS and get official support from Eucalyptus for it. Yes our support is not just paid support but we have a very extensive community to help you get started or solve your problems.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Nowadays company employees are often dispersed across the globe and collaboration tools turn out to be of current importance in achieving shared goals. OnlyOffice is a platform for small and medium business that enables teams to manage projects, customer relations and documents in one place. Linux users can take advantage of open source version and start to collaborate on projects hosted safely on their own servers. ONLYOFFICE is a cloud business service that enables you to manage projects, customer relations and documents in one place.

BSD

• Owing to its historic roots as a derivative of the original Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD), OpenBSD includes a great deal of old code. Many files bear copyright notices from the year 1980, and in some cases, even older. Although not explicitly stated as a project goal, keeping OpenBSD modern is an important part of satisfying other goals, such as portability and correctness.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• coreutils is the project that implements about 100 of the most well known and used utilities on any GNU/Linux system. These utilities are used interactively, or extensively in other programs and scripts, and are integral to the standard Linux server distros used today. Originally these utilities were implemented only considering ASCII or sometimes implicitly other unibyte character sets, but many of the assumptions break down in the presence of multi-byte encodings. As time has gone on this has become more of an issue as this graph representing the rise of UTF-8 use on the web indicates.

• Why the name “userops”? As you may have guessed, this is a pun on the term “devops”; the idea is that we also care about configuration management and deployability, but we aim for a different audience. Devops, as the name implies, focuses on liberating developers in the world of deployment, particularly developers who have to deploy a large number of machines for $LARGE_CORPORATION at their job. Userops, on the other hand, aims at liberating users in the world of deployment. You shouldn’t have to be a developer to take advantage of network freedoms and run network-oriented free software. After all, the free software world generally agrees that it makes sense that users of desktop software should not have to be developers, and that “user freedom” takes priority over “developer freedom”… the freedom of $LARGE_CORPORATION, while not something we object to, is not really our primary concern. (Though of course, if we build solutions that are good enough for end-users, corporations will probably adopt them, and that is fine! It just isn’t our focus.)

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The Greens in the German parliament want the Foreign Ministry to revert back to open source software solutions on its workstations. The ministry in 2010 abandoned its open source desktop strategy, pressured by staffers struggling with interoperability problems. The Greens are now asking the ministry to justify the proprietary licence costs it has made since then.

• The vision behind the open source and big data initiatives underway in the federal government is far more ambitious than just a series of technology projects, but aims to further transparency, citizen engagement and achieve a major shift in agency culture.

Licensing

• VMware thinks it will be possible to find an amicable resolution to the lawsuit alleging it has pinched parts of the Linux kernel.

Openness/Sharing

• In the quarter century since its creation, the Web has been a printing press and broadcast studio for millions of people whose voices would otherwise have been heard by only a few close friends. It opened a whole new world of sharing, and today nearly three-quarters of all Americans say digital technologies have improved their ability to share their ideas and creations with others, according to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center.

• The Commission has helped Member States to transpose the directive with the publication of a series of guidelines, he added. “Open access is now mainstream,” he said, adding that the Commission was engaged in a policy of openness within the Digital Single Market program.

Open Data

• Information about French companies, collected and centralised by InfoGreffe, will now be freely accessible. French Members of Parliament have voted in favour of article 19 of the draft Loi Macron (named after Emmanuel Macron, Minister of Economic Affairs, who supports the law). The article, which states that InfoGreffe information will now be available as Open Data, was approved in February.

Open Access/Content

• The price of textbooks continues to be a cost barrier for postsecondary students, even though some states are making notable efforts to bring those costs down. Open Educational Resources are an emerging policy option as states, postsecondary systems and institutions consider how to best develop libraries and collections of OERs

Open Hardware

• Marius Kintel released a major new version of OpenSCAD, a 3D solid modeling application popular with the makers movement and 3D printing communities.

Programming

• Gnome Terminal is good enough for my needs. I do have a problem of too many terminal windows… I have tried Terminator (a tiling single-window / multiple-tabs terminal). However during development the things I use shell for, should be part of the IDE directly: changing projects, opening/closing/navigating/creating files, invoking build, invoking debug, “refactoring” (sed). I think I do want to try out a pull-down terminal for temporal look-ups together with a tiling “main” terminal. Or ideally ditch it all together. Emacs does provide multiple terminals, but when I did that I ended up with “inception” -> launching an instance of emacs, inside the terminal, inside emacs…

• Go, a Google-developed open source language intended to focus on simplicity and efficiency, has been getting a lot of attention lately. Launched late in 2009, the statically typed language is perhaps best known for its use in the development of the red-hot Docker container platform. “Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming,” a FAQ on Go reads.

• To get some idea of what I mean by this, suppose you are a happy consumer of R packages, but want access to, say, the latest, greatest releases of my distribution package, sadist.

• For those who don’t know, dolt is a wrapper and replacement for libtool on sane systems that don’t need it at all. It was created some years ago by Josh Triplett to overcome the slowness of libtool.

Standards/Consortia

• Government use of open ICT standards are fundamental for smaller ICT companies and for innovation in society, concludes Professor Björn Lundell of the University of Skövde (Sweden), following a three-year research project. “Open standards promote a healthy, competitive market.”

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• I’m not a journalist, but as of this morning I know what it feels like to be part of the biggest leak in NHS history.

• Published on openDemocracy, the memorandum of information for the £700m sell-off of Staffordshire cancer services is now available for the 800,000 directly affected and 3 million indirectly affected patients to read online.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• March 9, 2015 marked the seventieth anniversary of the American firebombing of Tokyo, World War II’s deadliest day.

• More people died that night from napalm bombs than in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But few in the United States are aware that the attack even took place.

• What’s behind the Obama Administration’s recent imposition of sanctions against Venezuelan officials, and its claim that Venezuela threatens U-S national security? Gloria La Riva and Roger Harris address this question.

• IN THE VIDEO, Sami Osmakac is tall and gaunt, with jutting cheekbones and a scraggly beard. He sits cross-legged on the maroon carpet of the hotel room, wearing white cotton socks and pants that rise up his legs to reveal his thin, pale ankles. An AK-47 leans against the closet door behind him. What appears to be a suicide vest is strapped to his body. In his right hand is a pistol.

• [...]

• Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months. The FBI provided all of the weapons seen in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. The bureau also gave Osmakac the car bomb he allegedly planned to detonate, and even money for a taxi so he could get to where the FBI needed him to go. Osmakac was a deeply disturbed young man, according to several of the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him before trial. He became a “terrorist” only after the FBI provided the means, opportunity and final prodding necessary to make him one.

• Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) stood by his decision Sunday to send a letter on a burgeoning nuclear deal directly to Iranian leaders. He insisted on Face the Nation that “Iran’s leaders need to hear the message loud and clear” that an Obama-brokered deal might not last past the end of his administration without congressional approval, despite a stern letter from the White House Sunday night urging senators to hold off on congressional intervention.

Transparency Reporting

• The State Department said Friday it was unable to automatically archive the emails of most of its senior officials until last month, which could mean potential problems for historical record-keeping amid criticism of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a private email server while in office.

• The State Department shut down large parts of its unclassified email system today in a final attempt to rid it of malware believed to have been inserted by Russian hackers in what has become one of the most serious cyber intrusions in the department’s history, U.S. officials told ABC News.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• About half the population of the South Pacific Island state of Vanuatu has been left homeless by a devastating category 5 cyclone that flattened buildings and washed away roads and bridges. Aid agencies say Cyclone Pam killed at least eight people, with the death toll expected to rise as rescuers reach more far-flung areas. Vanuatu has a population of about 250,000 and is made up of more than 80 islands. Disaster relief officials and relief workers are still trying to establish contact with remote islands that bore the brunt of winds of more than 185 miles per hour. We are joined by Alex Mathieson, former Vanuatu country director for the aid group Oxfam.

• Will isn’t the only prominent climate change denier given a prestigious soapbox by the Post.

• Britain’s first “poo bus”, which runs on human and household waste, goes into regular service this month.

• Powered by biomethane gas, the Bio-Bus will use waste from more than 32,000 households along its 15-mile route.

• When Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was made head of the Senate committee in charge of NASA’s funding, I (and many others) were appalled. Cruz is a science denier, flatly claiming global warming isn’t happening.

• This is an issue, since many of NASA’s missions are directly focused on examining the amount, extent, and impact of that warming. And rightly so.

Finance

• Gigaom’s investors are still hopeful that the company has value, and are continuing to shop it: The sales pitch is that the site itself still generates traffic and ad revenue, and the company’s events business could still draw attendees and sponsors. Some people affiliated with Gigaom believe that Time Inc., International Data Group and O’Reilly Media are all looking at the property. All three companies declined to comment.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Another striking omission from these articles, about a speech in which Netanyahu talked about Iran’s “aggression in the region and in the world,” were words like “Palestine,” “Palestinian,” “occupation” or “Gaza”; none of these came up in any of the five articles. USA Today headlined its piece “Netanyahu: Stop Iran’s ‘March of Conquest’”–as though it were Iran, not Israel, that has conquered, occupied and in some cases annexed its neighbors’ territory.

Privacy

• A judicial advisory panel Monday quietly approved a rule change that will broaden the FBI’s hacking authority despite fears raised by Google that the amended language represents a “monumental” constitutional concern.

• The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules voted 11-1 to modify an arcane federal rule to allow judges more flexibility in how they approve search warrants for electronic data, according to a Justice Department spokesman.

• A majority of Americans have not altered their online behavior in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations detailing widespread US government electronic surveillance activities, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Monday.

• Vigilant Solutions’ automatic license plate readers are everywhere, even places where you wouldn’t expect them. Like, mounted on private companies’ vehicles. This isn’t new. BetaBoston investigated the private ALPR growth industry early last year. Unfortunately, there’s been very little good news to report since then. In fact, there still isn’t.

• According to the Fusion article, Hertz doesn’t seem to be telling anyone about the camera, on the grounds that the company doesn’t plan to use it, and so there’s nothing for customers to know. But if and when it does announce its presence, there will be precisely the problem Techdirt mentioned last week: that people in front of it would naturally be worried they were being spied upon — even if assured to the contrary — and would start constraining their speech and behavior.

• This week I got an angry email from a friend who had just rented a car from Hertz: “Did you know Hertz is putting cameras in rental cars!? This is bullsh*t. I wonder if it says they can tape me in my Hertz contract.”

Civil Rights

• An elected Sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who was attending a community meeting in Boynton Beach, Florida, reportedly told the group to run over protesters that were blocking the road.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• While the FCC’s new net neutrality rules are certainly a step in the right direction for consumers, it’s aggressively premature to uncork the champagne. There are still ISP lawsuits waiting in the wings, not to mention the fact that a 2016 party shift (and subsequent FCC leadership change) could very quickly dismantle ten years of grassroots activism in the blink of an eye. And then there are the rules themselves and the FCC’s dedication to them; as noted last week, it’s difficult to know just how useful the new Title II-based rules are going to be until we see precisely what the FCC defines as actionable behavior.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• On 23 and 24 March 2015, you will examine the proposed amendements to the report of MEP Julia Reda on the reform of the directive on copyright. More than 500 amendements have been tabled, the large majority of which aim at emptying it from its substance. Julia Reda’s draft report responds to the aspirations expressed by a large number of citizens: they wish to access, to share and t more widely culture and knowledge in the digital environment. La Quadrature du Net calls the MEPs of the JURI commission to preserve the progress in this report and in particular those that strenghten the positive rights of individuals in culture.

• Julia Reda, German Pirate Party MEP, has presented a report promoting a series of measures to harmonise some aspects of copyright.

• France’s cultural industries have shown their determination to fight European copyright reform plans. A parallel movement among members of the European Parliament hopes to have the Electronic Commerce Directive re-examined as part of the reform package. EurActiv France reports.

• History repeats itself. Unlicensed home manufacturing of copies was never the cause of the copyright industry’s business problems; they created those all on their own. It’s not the first time they’ve appointed a scapegoat for their own failures to get public funding, either.

• After years of debating U.S. Internet subscribers now have Government regulated Net Neutrality. A huge step forward according to some, but the full order released a few days ago reveals some worrying caveats. While the rules prevent paid prioritization, they do very little to prevent BitTorrent blocking, the very issue that got the net neutrality debate started.

• In the beginning of The Pirate Bay’s history the site was in Swedish. It was made by Swedes for their community. Other countries had their own file sharing sites but they got shut down.

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