● 04.01.15

● Links 1/4/2015: $149 Chromebook, Cinnamon 2.4.7

Posted in News Roundup at 5:18 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Europe and North America were the stars. Oceania, Africa and Asia are still lagging but also moving up. It’s interesting that Europe seemed more enthusiastic for GNU/Linux than USA, the home of GNU/Linux, but USA is rapidly catching up.

• A few weeks ago Google made headlines with the launch of the new Chromebook Pixel, the highest-end Chromebook on the market (and with a price to show for it). Today, the Chrome OS laptop ecosystem is launching two products that are the exact opposite: the Haier Chromebook 11 (now available online at Amazon) and the Hisense Chromebook (now available at Walmart). Both of these 11.6-inch Chromebooks will retail for $149, making them the most affordable Chromebooks yet.

• Google just announced a slew of Chrome OS powered devices, including a Flip Chromebook from ASUS and a Chromebit device which is a complete Chrome OS device on a stick.

• Buried under these announcements where the arrival of Google Drive for Linux. For some reason Google doesn’t have Linux on their priority list anymore this Drive for Linux didn’t even get their own press release.

• Katie Roberts-Hoffman, Engineer and ARM Wrestler at Google wrote in a blog post announcing the new Chrome OS devices, “Google Drive for Linux brings the much requested service to those enterprise customers who run their businesses on Linux.”

Server

• An industry syndicate has launched a Linux distribution optimized to support deployment of routing software and software defined networks (SDN) on x86 servers.

Kernel Space

• Over the past six months I’ve asked new Linux Foundation corporate members on the cutting edge of technology to weigh in on what interesting or innovative trends they’re witnessing and the role that Linux plays in them. Here’s what engineers, CTOs, and other business leaders from companies including CoreOS, Rackspace, SanDisk, and more had to say.

• Docker and Linux container technologies dominate headlines today as a powerful, easy way to package applications, especially as cloud computing becomes more mainstream. While still a work-in-progress, they offer a simple, clean and lean way to distribute application workloads.

• With enthusiasm continuing to grow for container innovations, a related technology called unikernels is also beginning to attract attention. Known also for their ability to cleanly separate functionality at the component level, unikernels are developing a variety of new approaches to deploy cloud services.

• Daniel Vetter of Intel today sent in more code for DRM-Next that in turn will be merged for the Linux 4.1 kernel. It was also signaled that the initial hardware enablement of the graphics processor on Intel’s upcoming “Braxton” SoC might happen for this next version of the Linux kernel.

• The drm-intel-next changes submitted today were some DP link rate refactoring, RPS tuning for Bay Trail and Braswell, more PPGTT PTE work, Valley View DPLL code refactoring, rotated GGTT view support, and other code cleaning. These changes are on top of the Intel DRM changes already queued up for Linux 4.1.

• Linux 4.0 should be officially released within the next few weeks. In anticipation of its April debut, here’s a look at some of the big features for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Graphics Stack

• Before ending out March, here’s some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

• As some recent non-performance testing of the AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers on Linux, I checked in to see how well the various Linux desktop environments were working these days in multi-monitor setups. With the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards and drivers, I tried out Unity, GNOME Shell, Xfce, and (attempted) KDE Plasma 5 on Ubuntu 15.04 to check out the latest experience.

Benchmarks

• In continuation of this morning’s article about Turning A Basement Into A Big Linux Server Room that detailed my month-long process of building out the new Linux automated benchmark server room, here’s details on the software deployment side.

• This week I posted about my new server room, where there’s Linux benchmarks constantly happening on the Linux kernel and other open-source code via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. With many Phoronix readers having been interested in the basement makeover I did to turn a ugly, boring basement into a clean server room, here’s more details and pictures on the month-long renovation along with various tips and product recommendations from the experience. This server room is now almost up to 50 systems and is complete with a drink bar and projector. There’s plenty of pictures and details for those hoping to build their own personal basement server room, including a few tips for increasing the wife acceptance factor of the big project.

Applications

• It is with great pleasure and satisfaction that I release version 4.1 of Obnam, my backup program. This version includes a radically innovative approaches to data compression and de-duplication, as well as some other changes and bug fixes.

• I’ve released man-pages-3.82. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

• GnuCash is a personal and small-business financial/accounting application that’s been freely licensed and distributed under the GNU GPL license for a long time. A new update that brings numerous bug fixes has been released and is now ready for download.

• If you were using Windows in past then probably you would have used CCleaner to analyse and delete junk files, temporary files and free up space by deleting recycled files. On Linux we’ve a good alternative to CCleaner, BleachBit. BleachBit analyses and deletes junk files, temporary files, Browsers history, cache and free up disc space. Let’s take a look at some of its features and know how to install latest BleachBit on Linux.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• CrossOver Linux is an application based on Wine that permits users to install and run software that was designed for Windows operating systems. It’s more than just front-end for Wine, and it comes with some interesting features, so the fact that you can buy it at a big discount should catch your eye.

Games

• Developed by the French studio Pastagames, who created the excellent Rayman Jungle Run among many others, Pix the Cat has been positively received by the press (80% Metacritic), winning over 1 million players since its release on PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and PC.

• The last week of March has been very interesting for the Linux users. Quite a few games have been released in the span of just a few days, but there are three among them that warrant a little bit more attention.

• But nsuds manages to take that simple game and turn it into a text-based tour-de-force. If you remember my list of high points for text-based software from the start of this year, nsuds manages to hit everything — cleanly, and with considerable authority too.

• Well, I was writing up both Outlast & Shadow warrior, then I checked my twitter feed and…dayam! Outlast & Shadow warrior are both now on Linux and in the brand new Humble Indie Bundle 14, what a day!

• The dated (but still good) simulation game is now available DRM free from GOG. The Linux version only appeared on Steam in December, so GOG are only 4 months later on this one.

• Mark of the Ninja is a 2D action stealth game developed by Klei Entertainment and published by Microsoft Studios. The Steam for Linux version is now available for purchase with a 75% discount.

• In a very recent video from Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts, he outlines what’s going on with the Linux version, and sadly the news right now isn’t too healthy. It’s not all doom and gloom, but it doesn’t sound like we will be able to play it any time soon.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• While every effort in KDE Telepathy went to the Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5 porting and KAccounts migration, there are still distros/users that have KDE Telepathy 0.9 (the kde4 one) running in Plasma 5 session. All the applications of KDE Telepathy work just fine, the only problem are the Plasma applets, those are totally incompatible.

• KDE developers have been porting their Plasma 5 + KDE Frameworks 5 stack over to Wayland, but at this point it’s not nearly as mature as the GNOME Wayland support. As such, KDE developers have to fend off questions from time-to-time why they don’t “just integrate QtCompositor” or the Weston library for speeding up their efforts.

• Relatively regularly I’m asked why I don’t “just” integrate QtCompositor or libweston and call it a day. Well it should be obvious, if it were as simple as “just” we would do that So instead of replying again and again I thought to give a full blog post explaining the options and why they don’t really suit our needs.

• As you may or may not have heard, Facebook is deprecating the XMPP gateway for its Chat service by the end of April. That effectively means that no 3rd party applications will be able to send messages to your Facebook contacts. At least not officially.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Cinnamon is a desktop environment built by the Linux Mint team and it’s implemented by default in the Mint OSes. The current update, 2.4.7 is just a maintenance one, but it’s pretty extensive and it comes with a ton of changes.

• Following last week’s release of GNOME 3.16, the initial builds of the GNOME SDK Runtime are now available for those wishing to experiment with their new fully-sandboxed Linux app tech and other new app runtime abilities.

• As people who have followed the work on sandboxed applications know, we have promised a developer preview for GNOME 3.16. Well, 3.16 has now been released, so the time is now!

Distributions

Reviews

• We may deride Ubuntu for being modern and newb-friendly and not pure Linux or whatever. But that’s nonsense. This splendid distribution, especially in its LTS form, eats hardware platforms for breakfast. I have not yet found a single machine that it didn’t support, and didn’t support almost 100%. Nigh perfect. This last case is yet another example.

• I guess the path for future testing has been laid out. I may have to play a bit with setting UEFI on and off, and definitely use Ubuntu bootloader to get things going, but from now, other distributions ought to be able to install. Or not. Either way, I shall copiously rant about it to your uttermost delight. Summing up what we saw today, Netrunner works fine, with numerous limitations and heavy memory consumption. Trusty is a perky little beast with no faults or problems, it’s lithe and lean and cool, and purrs like a happy kitten no matter where placed or tested. Draw your own conclusions, dear readers. More distro testing coming soon. Mint, Kubuntu, for sure. Some others, too.

New Releases

• Steven Shiau has released a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system aimed at system administrators who want an easy-to-use, portable, and straightforward solution for cloning disk drives.

Screenshots

Kolab/SUSE

• openSUSE is among the most reputed and prolific open source community which contribute heavily to many open source projects. The community is organizing this year’s openSUSE Conference at The Hague during 1-4 May. From the current program line-up the conference looks like pure fun for developers and those who aspire to become one.

• Working with Kolab has kept me busy on numerous fronts since I joined near the end of last year. There is the upcoming Kolab Summit, refreshing Kolab Systems’ messaging, helping with progress around Kolab Now, collaborating on development process improvement, working on the design and implementation of Akonadi Next, the occassional sales engineering call … so I’ve been kept busy, and been able to work with a number of excellent people in the process both in Kolab Systems and the Kolab community at large.

Red Hat Family

• But, it turns out that I was a bit conservative with my estimates. And it also turns out that I did not give the OpenShift platform the respect it deserves. OpenShift is an open-source PaaS platform by Red Hat. Red Hat released fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2014 results that nicely beat analysts’ top and bottom line expectations, powered by strong adoption of OpenStack and OpenShift.

• The CentOS Project is happy to announce the availability of CentOS 7 (1503). This release includes a number of new features including a major update to IPA, which adds support for two-factor authentication. Other enhancements include the addition of OpenJDK 8, the return of Thunderbird, and improved container support.

• Red Hat has become a role model for open source aspirants. They make more than a billion dollars per year from open source software; no secret sauce. Red Hat’s solution powers companies and organizations around the globe.

Fedora

• fedocal 0.13 release makes it possible for anyone to download iCal file for a meeting and brings support for client side notifications.

Debian Family

• We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for veryone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 8 – “Jessie”.

• The Debian Release Team, through Niels Thykier, has announced earlier today, March 31, that they have decided to mark the day of Saturday, April 25, 2015, as the release date for the highly anticipated Debian GNU/Linux 8 (codename Jessie) computer operating system.

• Niels Thykier today posted that Debian 8.0 now has a “target release date.” This isn’t written in stone, but it would take something “really critical” to postpone the release. Elsewhere, the Gentoo Linux project today announced the launch of their “totally revamped and more inclusive website.” The announcement stated that the old site wasn’t “as inclusive as we would have liked.”

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• There were many things that made the early Linux desktop candidates difficult to manage. Lacking the vast catalog of drivers that Windows had at its disposal, for example, peripheral device support was a challenge. As was getting functionality like suspend working properly – not that Windows supported it flawlessly, of course. But assuming you could get these early builds up and running, at least, one of the most under-appreciated challenges of navigating the very different user interface was choice.

• A new update for the RTM branch of Ubuntu Touch is in the works, and the developers are making the final adjustments. Users should see improvements in battery life, among other changes.

• Canonical has announced that an Apache Standard Taglibs vulnerability has been fixed for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This is not a major problem, but an update doesn’t hurt.

• Details about Mono vulnerabilities which has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, were published by Canonical in a security notification.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but its makers are also working on a Debian-based one. The leader of the project has confirmed that they have no intention to replace one with the other unless the Debian edition becomes immensely popular.

Devices/Embedded

• The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to emerge as one of this year’s big tech stories. IBM has announced that it will invest $3 billion across four years to build out an Internet of Things (IoT) unit, and the unit’s first job is to build a cloud-based open platform. IBM actually has a lot of tools and experience in the area of sifting and sorting real-time data, and may be able to contribute a lot of momentum to the Internet of Things. Here are details.

• Actions Technology released a quad-core Cortex-A9 “S500″ SoC, along with an “ActDuino S500″ SBC based on it, plus support for Android 5.0 and Linux.

• Google just introduced a whole new kind of Chrome OS computer—a dongle that plugs into any HDMI-equipped display. It’s called a Chromebit, and it isn’t your run-of-the-mill streaming stick. For under $100, you’re looking at a full computer that plugs right into your TV.

Phones

Android

• The Android 5.1 update promises a range of enhancements but Nexus users may have a different opinion. According to recent reports, despite the interesting features of the Android 5.1 firmware, many Nexus users have been experiencing problems with it. One of the most persistent and frequently cited problems is the memory leak issue causing apps to crash and memory to drain. Google did confirm a fix is on its way but may require users to have more patience.

• Android Auto product manager Daniel Holle told Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo that the launch is planned for later in the year, however a specific date is yet to be defined as car manufacturers still need time to integrate the software to their vehicles.

• Back when Facebook announced its acquisition of WhatsApp for $16 billion last year, some people were scratching their heads at why WhatsApp would command that price. According to Sequoia Capital: “By using the Internet as its communications backbone, WhatsApp has completely transformed personal communications, which was previously dominated by the world’s largest wireless carriers.” The company added that WhatsApp has more than 450 million active users–nothing to shake a stick at.

• Convinced that “whatever can be unit tested should be unit tested”, Mona El Mahdy, a Software Engineer in Test at Google, has written a blog post proposing several approaches to perform unit tests on the user interface of Android applications. Mahdy recommends Robolectric and the Android Studio Gradle plug-in for general unit testing, and Espresso or UI Automator for creating and running UI tests.

• It’s always been a little puzzling why Google had two operating systems, Android and Chrome OS. Over time, Google seems to have realized that itself, and is bringing the two closer and closer together.

• The Galaxy S6 is what happens when Samsung doesn’t try to copy Apple’s phones, but instead finally tries to copy Apple’s product philosophy.

• Google’s Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop update is now several weeks old. In the weeks since the start of the roll out, we’ve learned a number of new details about the company’s Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop release. As we head into a new month, we want to take a look at everything we know, and don’t know, about Google’s Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop update and release.

• Android apps are the best. The only thing cooler than having them run on your phone is if you could somehow bring them to your desktop. Well, you can. Using Chrome and Google’s App Runtime for Chrome (ARC for short), developers were given the ability to port their Android apps by having them run as a Chrome app. Initially there were only 4 apps available (Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine), and only for Chrome OS users, although a “hack” was later discovered.

Free Software/Open Source

• A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.

Events

• The conference will take place on May 29 and 30, at UIC in Chicago. Building on the success of the previous conferences in 2009-2014, we expect more than 250 attendees from around the world. R users from industry, academia, and government will joining 30+ presenters covering all areas of finance with R.

• As with 2014 and several years prior, 2015 is the year of the Linux smartphone. There are a number of mobile/embedded environments based on the Linux kernel, the most prominent of course being Android. One consequence of this prominence is a variety of projects derived from Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which raises the question of how best to manage them, and additionally if it is possible to run a single binary image of the various software components across a variety of devices. In addition, although good progress has been made upstreaming various Android patches, there is more work to be done for ADF, KMS, and Sync, among others. Migrating from Binder to KDBus is still a challenge, as are a number of other candidates for removal from drivers/staging. There are also issues remaining with ION, cenalloc, and DMA API. Finally, power management is still in need of improvement, with per-process power management being a case in point.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox 37.0 has been released. This release features improved protection against site impersonation via OneCRL centralized certificate revocation, Bing search now uses HTTPS for secure searching, opportunistic encrypting of HTTP traffic where the server supports HTTP/2 AltSvc, and more. See the release notes for details.

• As expected, Mozilla had the pleasure of unveiling today, March 31, the Mozilla Firefox 37.0 web browser for all supported computer operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, while pushing Firefox 40 to the nightly (unstable channel), Firefox 39.0 to the Dev channel, and Firefox 38.0 to the Beta channel.

• Mozilla is today releasing Firefox 37.0 and with this open-source web-browser update comes many changes.

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack Live attendees will have several opportunities to hear Amrith Kumar speak. Kumar, the founder and CTO of Tesora, will give three talks: Replication and Clustering with OpenStack Trove; Deploying, Configuring, and Operating OpenStack Trove; and An introduction to Database as a Service with an emphasis on OpenStack using Trove.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The LibreOffice project was announced with great fanfare in September 2010. Nearly one year later, the OpenOffice.org project (from which LibreOffice was forked) was cut loose from Oracle and found a new home as an Apache project. It is fair to say that the rivalry between the two projects in the time since then has been strong. Predictions that one project or the other would fail have not been borne out, but that does not mean that the two projects are equally successful. A look at the two projects’ development communities reveals some interesting differences.

BSD

• The next version of the Lumina Desktop Environment has just been released!

• The PC-BSD developers responsible for their new Lumina desktop environment have released a new version of their custom interface.

FSF

• My sponsor for attending LibrePlanet was John Sullivan, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, and I was surprised that he took the time to get me shown around. I wanted to kiddingly say to John, “Hey, you got people to do this, right?” I didn’t because I was afraid the humor would not have translated well…and I’m not sure it did here either.

• On March 21st of this year, the Free Software Foundation presented our organization Reglue with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit. We share that announcement link with Sébastien Jodogne for being given the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. We’re specifically thankful that people like Sean “NZ17″ Robinson spearheaded this nomination campaign and got us into the running.

Public Services/Government

• Malcolm Senior, director of informatics at the Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, has been writing about the prospect of open source in the NHS.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Ordnance Survey (OS), the British national mapping agency, has switched to version 3 of the Open Government Licence as the default for all of its open data products. This should make it easier for the open data community and other data publishers to re-use the OS mapping data, and for the data to be freely and easily mixed with other UK government sources.

• Italy has published its second OGP Action Plan, covering the period 2014-2016. The central themes in the plan are participation, transparency, technological innovation, integrity, and accountability. Several online portals, including the Italian open data platform, will be extended with new functionality.

Open Hardware

• When engineering students start college, the high cost of proprietary tools can be a barrier to making their dreams become a reality. Recent advances in free and open source 3D printing have lowered rapid prototyping costs, making it accessible to everyone. The software industry already knows the force of open source, so now it’s time to start teaching free and open source hardware to all engineers.

Programming

• Added to the latest LLVM Clang compiler code is driver support for Google’s Native Client SDK.

Leftovers

• You know what day it is. Yes, it’s March 31st, and that means the April Fools onslaught has commenced… because what’s better than one day when the internet becomes an annoying cacophony of fake news? Two of them, apparently. In fairness, Google’s pranks are usually less annoying than they are fun little games. Case in point, Pac-Man is invading Maps and Ingress.

• The OpenIndiana crew responsible for this community-based OpenSolaris-derived operating system using the Illumos kernel is out with their first update in quite some time.

Hardware

• The Korea Times said Samsung had declined comment while Google was not available for its report. It noted that Samsung’s manufacturing plant in Xian, China, would grow its 3D NAND chips shipment to 960,000 wafers this year, up from 480,000 in 2014.

Security

• IoT (Internet of Things) devices have – and in many cases have earned! – a rather poor reputation for security. It is easy to find numerous examples of security issues in various IoT gateways and devices.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Palestine formally joined the International Criminal Court on Wednesday, opening the door to the prosecution of Israelis for war crimes amid a stalled peace process.

• Any such probe of alleged Israeli crimes committed in Gaza would also include an investigation of the firing of rockets and mortars by Hamas militants at civilian areas in Israel.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• For seventy-five days straight the nation of Costa Rica has not burned any fossil fuels.

Finance

• A five-year neoliberal program in Honduras has contributed to the country’s far-reaching civic and economic deterioration. The increased privatization of Honduras’ economic activity and militarization of its police force has exacerbated the country’s rapid decline into inequality, violence, and lawlessness. The US has backed many of developments with $65 million in aid since 2008.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Three of Rupert Murdoch’s largest and most powerful news outlets promoted baseless conspiracy theories that Google is using its alleged “close ties” with the Obama administration to receive favorable treatment and to push its policy agenda. Murdoch has a long history of attacking Google.

Privacy

• After Snowden’s revelations, Swann’s thinking changed. The NSA’s tactics, which include retaining data from American citizens, raise too many questions in his mind: “I can’t see myself working there,” he says, “partially because of these moral reasons.”

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