● 04.28.15

● Links 28/4/2015: Plasma 5.3, Cutelyst 0.8.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:21 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Citrix is out with some interesting moves in the Linux virtual desktop arena. The company has a new kit called the “Linux Virtual Desktop Tech Preview” which is available here for XenApp or XenDesktop customers with active Subscription Advantage accounts. Citrix Partners can get it as well.

• François Beaufort, a Google developer, writes on his Google+ page that Chrome OS is receiving the ability to perform some Wifi functions while the device is sleeping.

• VXL Instruments has developed and designed exclusively in-house, VXL’s new, industry-leading Gio 6 Linux operating system features a new look, user-friendly design together with greater flexibility, connectivity, security and multimedia capabilities.

Server

• Linux network operating system developer Cumulus Networks this week at Interop rolled out a management platform that provides a common interface and operational process for data center racks.

• The Cumulus Rack Management Platform is based on the company’s Cumulus Linux network operating system code base. Out-of-band management switches running Cumulus RMP may be managed by the same Linux toolsets as both servers and data-plane switches running Cumulus Linux, the company says.

• VMware last week released details about two new open source projects that aim to bridge the divide between the company’s virtualization software and other vendors’ containers. Both projects integrate into VMware’s unified platform for the hybrid cloud, allowing the company to create a consistent environment for cloud-native and traditional applications.

Kernel Space

• One of the latest focuses of prolific free software developer Richard Hughes has been on fwupd, an open-source and easy way to update device firmware.

• Fwupd is part of the initiative to make updating of UEFI/BIOS easily from the Linux desktop and fwupd can be used for updating the firmware of peripheral devices like Richard Hughes’ ColorHug device.

• One of the use-cases I’ve got for fwupd is for updating firmware on small OpenHardware projects. It doesn’t make sense for each of the projects to write a GUI firmware flash program when most of them are using a simple HID or DFU bootloader to do basically the same thing. We can abstract out the details, and just require the upstream project to provide metadata about what is fixed in each update that we can all share.

Graphics Stack

• While I’ve posted some new AMD OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu 15.04 since last week’s release of the Vivid Vervet, the Radeon R9 290 wasn’t tested since at that time this Hawaii graphics card was busy on other Phoronix test systems. However, due to the interest level in seeing some fresh Ubuntu 15.04 numbers for the Radeon R9 290 series, here’s some numbers.

• While there’s still more work to be done before advertising OpenGL 4.0~4.1 compliance, the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver is now advertising support for GLSL 410 (4.10), the GL Shading Language version to match OpenGL 4.1.

• While the Nouveau developers remain blocked by NVIDIA on bringing up accelerated support for the GeForce GTX 900 series, with the forthcoming Linux 4.1 kernel there is initial GeForce GTX 750 “Maxwell” accelerated support out-of-the-box.

Applications

• Thanks to its new numbering scheme this is the first stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 5.x series and comes less than a year after the release of GCC 5.0, the experimental release.

• Unsettings, a tool which lets you change various Unity settings, was updated version 0.10 recently, bringing full support for Ubuntu 15.04.

• Introductions first. ndn has a precompiled Linux version that you see there, and as you might expect from the screenshots, I find it quite enjoyable. You can see the two-panel menu-based approach that hearkens back to Midnight Commander and its predecessor, Norton Commander.

Proprietary

• Vivaldi, a new Chromium/Blink based web browser aimed at power users, has reached Technical Preview 3, receiving numerous improvements such as data import from all major browser, on-demand image and plugin controls, optional native window decorations for Linux and more.

• There’s a new tech preview release out today for Vivaldi, the cross-platform, Chromium-powered web browser that’s been generating a fair amount of interest since its release earlier this year.

Instructionals/Technical

• In Plasma Desktop 5.3 (released today), the desktop configuration dialog offers a new experimental tweak: A mode in which widgets can be dragged around by pressing and holding anywhere on the widget. When enabled, the widget handle is also no longer shown just on hover, but only after a press and hold.

Games

• NOT A HERO sounds like a pretty crazy game, and it looks pretty nice too. The developer confirmed the game should come to Linux this summer.

• Crypt of the NecroDancer, a hardcore roguelike rhythm game developed by Brace Yourself Games and published by Klei Entertainment, has landed on Steam for Linux.

• I didn’t even realise they put the Linux version of these up, as they don’t generally do a lot of announcements for games that get Linux versions. As a big Star Wars fan, I applaud this move.

• For a while now Steam has been pushing its non-games app store, one of the latest editions to marketplace is the open source tool, Blender. With Blender you can make 3D animation films and even graphics for games.

• Double Fine has finally released the second chapter of its adventure puzzle game Broken Age, effectively completing the full experience. If you were waiting to sink your teeth into this Tim Schafer-style quest, now’s the perfect time.

• If you don’t know what Tim Schafer-style is, then shame on you, firstly. Secondly, look no further than his other big adventure games like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle, or the Monkey Island games. In short, he’s kind of a big deal.

• The Spatials is a great looking space station building and management game that’s now on Linux. It has been updated with a beta build that includes Linux, so I took a look.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Packages for the release of KDE’s desktop suite Plasma 5.3 are available for Kubuntu 15.04. You can get it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

• Today KDE makes a feature release of Plasma 5, versioned 5.3.

• Cutelyst the Qt Web Framework just got a new release!

Distributions

• BackBox Linux, a distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS, developed perform penetration tests and security assessments has just received a new update and is now ready for download.

New Releases

• deepin, a Linux distribution the offers users with a unique, stable, fast, safe, and user-friendly desktop experience based on the latest HTML5 technologies, has been upgraded to version 2014.3 and numerous improvements have been made.

• Robert Shingledecker has announced the immediate availability of Tiny Core 6.2 RC2 Linux operating system, one of the smallest full operating systems available right now.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• There is a new repository available with CUDA enabled programs in package format. This contains programs that have been linked to CUDA libraries or have CUDA support enabled. At the moment this is available only on Fedora 21, if there is sufficient feedback I will enable it also for other distributions.

• While Fedora 21 ships with decent OpenCL support, if you’re running the binary NVIDIA graphics driver on Fedora Linux and wishing to use CUDA-accelerated programs, it’s a little bit easier today thanks to a new third-party package repository.

• Panama Fedora team participated in Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISOL) given on Saturday, April 25th at Universidad del Istmo, main campus.

Debian Family

• New Debian releases don’t occur every day, or even every year. This past week, Debian 8.0 codenamed Jessie was released after nearly two years of development effort. Debian is the first major milestone update for the GNU/Linux distribution since Wheezy was released in 2013.

• OpenStack Sahara already provides the reproducible deployment system which you seem to wish. We “only” need Hadoop itself.

• For working with Debian packages, one method of maintaining them is to put them in git and use git-buildpackage to build them right out of the git repository. There are a few pitfalls with it, notably around if you forget to import the upstream you get this strange treeish related error which still throws me at first when I see it.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Next week marks the initial Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) for planning out the community+Canonical Ubuntu 15.10 release, the next major update to the popular Linux distribution due out in October.

• Many of the Ubuntu long-standing bugs have been fixed, even if some took years, but there is at least one that seems to survive from one iteration to another. We’re talking of course about the Ubuntu boot logo.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint and Ubuntu are two of the most popular desktop Linux distributions around. But why do some people gravitate towards Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu? Is Linux Mint actually better than Ubuntu? A redditor asked why some folks have been opting for Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu, and got some interesting responses.

Devices/Embedded

• Aaeon’s ruggedized, 158 x 95 x 20mm “Boxer-6403″ PC offers Celeron or Atom SoCs, plus four USB ports and double helpings of GbE, serial, and mini-PCIe I/O.

Phones

Tizen

• Tizen is a new Linux based HTML5 centric Operating System that will offer developers a great opportunity for developers to bring their existing or new apps to a brand new ecosystem, where they actually have a chance of being discovered, and better still stand a chance of generating some real cash revenue.

• The Samsung Smart TV revolution is upon us, and Samsung promises to redefine your viewing experience with television. We now have curved screens that feel more natural to watch as we see the world in a non-linear way, so why should we watch TV on a flat screen?

• Samsung Tizen TV offers some great image quality and promises to be able to become the Smart hub of your Smart home, allowing you to control peripheral devices from the comfort of your armchair.

Android

• For an entire generation, the name Nokia will stir up a lot of emotion. From the iconic 3210 to the symbolic N95, the pre-smartphone years were Nokia’s heyday and a large majority of current smartphone users will be able to recall using a Nokia handset in their past.

• If you’re not familiar with Disney Infinity, it’s basically the media giant’s answer to digital toys like Skylanders, Angry Birds Telepods, and Nintendo Amiibo. The gist is that you buy your kids RFID-enabled collectible statues, they stick ‘em on a base station, and then they can use digital versions of those characters inside the Disney Infinity game. Is there a technical reason that a completely digital character needs a $15 hunk of physical plastic to unlock? Why certainly, so long as “technical reason” includes “making Disney a boatload of money.”

• As of Monday, all was well in Pakistan’s Ayub National Park, at least as far as Google Maps was concerned, which was showing it as a verdant green swath of pixels.

• It was a nice change from the image of Google’s Android icon peeing on an Apple logo: an image that a map prankster uploaded to Google Maps and which had stayed up for an undetermined time.

• The Galaxy S4 may be more than two years old now, but it’s still very much a part of Samsung’s Lollipop upgrade plans. The device has already received an Android 5.0 upgrade, and according to a new report, Google Play Edition variants will get Android 5.1, too.

• Meanwhile, Google has kept the ability to customize Android Wear low compared to Android for smartphones and tablets, which has caused several manufacturers to experiment with homegrown solutions. These updates keep Android Wear’s feature set compelling enough to keep most OEMs from venturing out on their own.

• Livescribe has been in the business of merging physical content you generate — things like hand-written notes and voice recordings — with the digital world for years now. The Livescribe 3 “smartpen,” which launched in the fall of 2013, was certainly its most successful attempt to date. The combo of the Livescribe 3 pen alongside specially designed notebooks meant that you could take traditional notes, make drawings, do calculations, or anything else you do with a pen and paper and have them synced to your phone, tablet, or computer. That’s assuming you were an iOS user, of course — the Livescribe 3 only supported Apple’s mobile devices.

• While the Android 5.1 update probably won’t be hitting the Samsung Galaxy S6, Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 4 anytime soon, it does appear that the rumored Galaxy Android 5.1 Lollipop update will be hitting at least one device in the near future.

Free Software/Open Source

• Will there ever be another Red Hat? It depends on what you are asking. If the question is will there be other companies that go public based on a model of using open source to power an enterprise software offering, the answer is clearly yes. Hortonworks just did so and the IPO pipeline is likely to include companies like Cloudera, MapR, Talend, and a few others in the near future.

• An open source threat model is aiming to be a repository for risk assessment with the aim of allowing enterprise to focus on creating the right security controls for each business.

• Kong, which is available in distributions for CentOS, Debian, Docker and Ubuntu among others, is designed to work with a wide range of microservices and APIs in public and private clouds and on premise.

• Sponsor of OPNsense, an open source FreeBSD based firewall and routing platform, extends support to broader open source community.

Events

• PyCon 2015 was held in early April in Montreal, and if you couldn’t attend in person, you can attend at your leisure thanks to the great videos event organizers quickly uploaded to the PyCon YouTube channel. Normally I’m not a fan of watching conference videos, but I was disappointed to miss this year’s event, and I was impressed by how fast the videos went online, so I checked a few of them out.

Databases

• The nature of distributed architecture requires the user to think through how apps and services may run across multiple cloud services and data centers. Apps are one thing, but running a database in these types of environments carries a different level of complexity.

Semi-Open Source

• HashiCorp announced an early release of an open source secrets manager today appropriately called Vault. The tool provides a range of services including secure key and secret management with in-transit encryption, automated key creation, key revocation and detailed audit logs.

• [...]

• Like so many products, Vault emerged from an internal need driven by customers. HashiCorp is made up of five (now six) open source products and it sells a commercial front end to the open source tools called Atlas. It requires credentials to get to other services it connects to and IT pros were reluctant to simply enter the company credentials into a third-party tool like Atlas without some security.

• After creating the Vagrant devops tool, Mitchell Hashimoto has been anything but complacent. He’s launched several projects, including the Atlas end-to-end management system for controlling the open source projects used during a product’s lifecycle.

Public Services/Government

• Today’s interview is with Andrew Hoppin, the president of NuCivic.

• Last year Federal Computer Week named NuCivic as one of 17 “hot companies to watch.”

• The reason is that NuCivic helps agencies leverage open source software to achieve long term goals.

• The interview began with a comparison.

• Many listeners are aware that a popular operating system called Red Hat is a variation of Linux.

Openness/Sharing

• The software development process has evolved from vendors owning, controlling, and selling proprietary software into a collaborative, open source model. The process of producing energy is going through a similar evolution.

• Consumers have become producers, generating and sharing sustainable solar, wind, and hydro energy, and open source software is part of that energy production evolution. In this article, I will introduce PowerMatcherSuite, a Flexiblepower Alliance Network project licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0.

Open Hardware

• Makers, hobbyists and developers that are looking for an ultra Low cost 4 Channel 300KS/s Oscilloscope that is both Arduino compatible and been specifically designed to complement the DIY test bench.

Programming

• A small project I worked on during the last few weeks has now come together in new package RcppTOML which arrived on CRAN yesterday.

Leftovers

Security

Transparency Reporting

• Sweden’s Supreme Court has formally agreed to hear Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s appeal to overturn the arrest warrant against him for sexual assault allegations in the Nordic country. The move is the latest twist in the campaigner’s long legal battle.

• The Wikileaks founder has been living inside Ecuador’s embassy in London since June 2012 to avoid extradition.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The climate is full of feedback loops. When a warming climate melts sea ice, the water that’s left behind reflects far less sunlight, leading to a further warming. Now, some researchers at the University of California Berkeley have looked at a human feedback loop: the relation between climate change and air conditioning. Using Mexico as an example, they find that the rising use of air conditioning may boost the country’s electricity use and carbon emissions by 80 percent before the century is over—but only if economic growth continues at a pace that allows people to buy air conditioners.

Finance

• The concept of a job, as we know it, is starting to go away.

• Wall Street briefly halted trading for Twitter stock Tuesday afternoon after the company’s Q1 earnings were leaked early.

• Twitter missed analyst’s revenue projections, and the market reacted as Twitter stock quickly dipped almost 6 percent before trading was halted. Trading then resumed, and the stock finished the day down more than 18 percent.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Twenty-five years ago, Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson signed the nation’s first school voucher bill into law. Pitched as social mobility tickets for minority students, Wisconsin vouchers allow children to attend private, and sometimes religious, schools on the taxpayers’ dime.

Censorship

• Salman Rushdie has accused fellow authors, including Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje, of being “pussies” for boycotting an event organised by the free-speech organisation PEN at which the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is to be given an award.

• A debate has erupted over the decision by PEN American Center to give its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

• It was at the offices of Charlie Hebdo that an assault by Muslim extremists in January left 12 people dead, including the publication’s top editor and a number of prominent cartoonists.

• Demonoid, once one of the Internet’s most popular torrent sites, is now barring users who try to visit the site with advert blocking software Adblock installed. The move raises some interesting questions, not least the value of revenue to torrent sites and the intricacies of whether or not content really should be ‘free’.

Privacy

• Massachusetts State Police are shopping for a drone.

• Despite the heated debates around the implications of the French Intelligence Bill on civil liberties, a tentative agreement between right and left may guarantee its adoption. EurActiv France reports.

Civil Rights

• So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

• On Monday, the media was quick to paint a single picture of Baltimore: a chaos scene of violence and mayhem filled with images of looting, rioting, the burning of a CVS and the torching of a police car.

• The Metropolitan Police is set to reduce its number of IT systems from 520 to ‘about’ 200, according to its interim CTO Stephen Deakin.

• The force will invest £200 million by 2017 to replace its core IT estate and hand out 4G iPads to officers. It is set to buy 16,000 body-worn video cameras by spring 2016, Deakin told ComputerworldUK.

• When former CIA head David Petraeus was sentenced last week to two years of probation in a plea deal with the Justice Department for leaking classified information to his former lover and biographer, US Magistrate Judge David Keesler said he received letters supporting leniency for the retired four-star general.

• Keesler is said to have received nearly three dozen such letters, including some from high-level military and government officials.

• “The letters paint a portrait of a man considered among the finest military leaders of his generation who also has committed a grave but very uncharacteristic error in judgment,” Keesler said at the sentencing hearing.

• Whose tale was it, though? Here’s the first six citations from the Times story:

• “police said” “police said” “police also reported” “police said” “state and city officials said” “police acknowledged”

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