● 04.28.15

● Links 28/4/2015: More on Debian 8 “Jessie”, Fedora 22 Beta Walkthrough

Posted in News Roundup at 7:23 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Come November, some “pundit” will declare that next year is the year of Linux on the desktop. This November, expect a twist on that prediction, as 2016 could just perhaps conceivably be the year of virtual Linux desktops now that Citrix has taken kit capable of delivering it into Beta.

• That kit is called the “Linux Virtual Desktop Tech Preview” and can be had here if you’re a XenApp or XenDesktop customer with an active Subscription Advantage account. Citrix Partners can get it too.

Desktop

• Government statistics showed 64% of businesses use FLOSS operating systems and 96% used FLOSS applications in 2012. 99% of teenagers used PCs and Internet…

Server

• Cumulus Networks®, provider of the Cumulus® Linux® operating system for open networking, today announced the new Cumulus Rack Management Platform (RMP™) OS for out-of-band management switches. Developed in response to demand from major customers, this new OS extends open networking to the full rack and allows customers to manage their networks with one common interface and operational model.

• Developers and system administrators can finally agree on one thing: Containers are the perfect development playground. Virtual containers are chrooted directories (Folders for you Windows types) that are securely isolated from the rest of the operating system. Essentially, a container is a secure development system that only shares essential files with the host operating system, but allows a developer to work on applications without negatively affecting the host. A container has its own IP address, its own identity, its own filesystems (with the exception of a few shared with the host), and its own runlevel.

Kernel Space

• For some reason the men in the Linux community who hate women the most seem to have taken a dislike to systemd. I understand that being “conservative” might mean not wanting changes to software as well as not wanting changes to inequality in society but even so this surprised me. My last blog post about systemd has probably set a personal record for the amount of misogynistic and homophobic abuse I received in the comments. More gender and sexuality related abuse than I usually receive when posting about the issues of gender and sexuality in the context of the FOSS community! For the record this doesn’t bother me, when I get such abuse I’m just going to write more about the topic in question.

• So, to sum up: What Linus Torvalds, along with plenty of other hackers in the 1980s and early 1990s, wanted was a Unix-like operating system that was free to use on the affordable personal computers they owned. Access to source code was not the issue, because that was already available—through platforms such as Minix or, if they really had cash to shell out, by obtaining a source license for AT&T Unix. Therefore, the notion that early Linux programmers were motivated primarily by the ideology that software source code should be open because that is a better way to write it, or because it is simply the right thing to do, is false.

• Linus Torvalds announced a few minutes ago, April 27, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel, due for release later this year.

• Haswell and Broadwell (Intel’s previous and current generations of x86) both introduced a range of new power saving states that promised significant improvements in battery life. Unfortunately, the typical experience on Linux was an increase in power consumption. The reasons why are kind of complicated and distinctly unfortunate, and I’m at something of a loss as to why none of the companies who get paid to care about this kind of thing seemed to actually be caring until I got a Broadwell and looked unhappy, but here we are so let’s make things better.

• The latest work of Matthew Garrett is on further lowering the power consumption of modern x86 systems powered by Intel’s Haswell and Broadwell processors.

Graphics Stack

• For the past two years there has been an optional Gallium3D HUD to display various performance-related metrics as an overlay while running OpenGL applications with the Gallium3D drivers. With the latest Mesa Git code, the heads-up display can be a bit more customized.

• One of the big extensions of OpenGL 4.3 and also a requirement of OpenGL ES 3.1 is support for compute shaders. While the work isn’t complete yet, Intel’s open-source developers are making progress on GL_ARB_compute_shader support.

Benchmarks

• For at least the few graphics cards tested, the results of Linux 4.0 + Mesa 10.6-devel didn’t end up being much more interesting than the stock Ubuntu 15.04 numbers with Linux 3.19 and Mesa 10.5. However, for those interested, I’ve enclosed the results in this article. Though the Radeon HD 6870 numbers are missing as with Linux 4.0 stable the graphics card could no longer properly mode-set on this system: the HD 6450, HD 6570, HD 7850, and R9 270X all were fine in this situation.

• For those craving some more GCC 5 compiler benchmark numbers following last week’s release of GCC 5.1, here’s some new comparison numbers between GCC 4.9.2 stable and the near-final release candidate of GCC 5.1.

• Pardon for this light article due to still finishing up work on migrating to the new Phoronix web server while separately working to take care of thermal issues coming about in the new Linux benchmarking server room.

Applications

• Although similar to Indicator MultiLoad, a tool we featured in our list of 11 must-have Ubuntu power-ups, SysMonitor eschews fancier graphical touches, like usage graphs and theming options. Instead, the app offers a more extensible approach by letting users add and display custom sensor commands.

• We discussed the future of the Empathy IM client used as the default chat application in the GNOME desktop environment and many popular Linux distributions that rely on GNOME packages, such as Ubuntu, a couple of weeks ago.

• The final version of QEMU 2.3.0, an open source machine emulator and virtualizer software for GNU/Linux operating systems, was announced today, April 27, by the QEMU development team, through Michael Roth.

• QEMU 2.3 was officially released today as the latest major release for this important component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

• Audio on Linux is pretty complex. Everything interacts with the Pulse Audio Sound Server. Many different audio devices and programs all communicate with your speaker system from there. Everything is nice and usually sounds great – at least for the most part.

• jAlbum, a tool that can be used to create online photo albums and that has built-in support for organizing and editing images, has been upgraded to version 12.6.4 and is now ready for download.

• The Blender Foundation, the developer of Blender, an integrated 3D creation software suite, has announced that their application is now available on Steam for Linux.

• The Git development team has announced the immediate availability for download of the seventh maintenance release for the stable 2.3 branch of the acclaimed Git open source distributed version control system used by developers worldwide.

Proprietary

• I tested Devede in Ubuntu 15.04, and the installation went without a hitch, but there is a caveat. Installing the DEB files provided by the developer doesn’t bring all the other required components, and I’m not talking about dependencies. The application installs just fine, and it starts, but it makes use of other components like Mplayer, VLC, and a bunch of other stuff.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Feral Interactive, the company in charge of porting Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor to the Linux platform, is now teasing an impending release for the game.

• The top ten sellers on Steam for Linux list shows that the platform has come a long way and is now ready to take on a much serious role in the gaming industry.

• We can add ‘InsGames’ to the list of developers who promise a Linux version, and deliver it eventually! Just over a year ago I wrote about the developers stating Antisquad would come to Linux, and here it is.

• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a gorgeous looking exploration and mystery game that will be moved to Unreal Engine 4. The developers stated they hope this will make a Linux port easier.

• A few days ago we notified you about signs of Arma 3 coming to Linux, and now it looks even more likely.

• The Steam for Linux platform is growing at a fantastic rate, and there are now more than 1100 titles on this platform that have support for open source operating system.

• Sol, a new platformer with a cheery sense of humor and with plenty of throwbacks to games of yesteryear, has been released. Most strikingly, the game features a myriad of accessibility options and is licensed under the GPLv3.

• SuperTux 0.3.5 already released two weeks ago, but i still want to publish a news item on this because I think it’s important to feature the open source games.

• Officially released at the end of June 2012, the ninth installment in the Spec Ops series, Spec Ops: The Line, is a third-person shooter video game published by 2K Games and developed by Yager Development.

• I’m really looking forward to SpecOps: The Line, and now that it’s official I couldn’t be happier! We don’t have many great looking third person shooters, and VP’s porting has come a long way.

• I’m cautiously optimistic about SpecOps: The Line as it looks like a great game, but due to my hard crashes with VP’s port of Bioshock, I don’t want my wee heart broken.

• The developers now list it on their website directly as a Linux port in the “alpha” stages.

• It was this week three years ago when there was the big Steam Linux reveal when I was over at Valve HQ learning from Gabe Newell about their Steam Linux client plans, their ambitions for a Steam Linux distribution on consoles (now known as SteamOS), and much more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• As you may have already read the blog post from Eike Hein about Building on new pillars: Activities and KPeople in Plasma 5.3, activities can provide the useful information about the recent applications and resources used by them.

• Now, kreenshot-editor is a new Qt-based project that was inspired by Greenshot’s image editor. It is hosted on KDE playground. It focuses on the image editing task, can be invoked from command line and should also provide a resuable editor component which could be integrated into other screencapture tools. The current code is already separated into an image editor widget and the main application.

• The latest version of Kubuntu, 15.04, aka Vivid Vervet was released last week and it’s available for free download. With this release it has become the first major distro to ship Plasma 5 as the default desktop environment.

• There are chances that some users may still have bad memories of Kubuntu. It’s true. Back in 2011 when Ubuntu made a switch to Unity, I started looking for alternatives as their desktop environment was not suited for me. I started trying KDE-based distros and Kubuntu was among the top choices. However my experience with the distro was mixed. It was buggy, bloated and GTK apps would look ugly in it. That’s when I found openSUSE and settled down with it.

• The list of students accepted to the 2015 edition of Google’s Summer of code has just been published. We’ve got two students this working on Krita: Jouni and Wolthera. Wolthera has been a Krita developer for quite some time, working on color selectors perspective assistants and more, while Jouni has contributed with bug fixes for 2.9.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This provides the description and results of my 1-person usability test for GNOME version 3.14.2. I set up the test environment on a virtual machine running Debian Jessie, and conducted the usability test with only one participant on February 21, 2015.

• When doing usability testing, I strongly believe that understanding the participants is a very important point that we shouldn’t ignore. Here, the tester was a 23 year old female student in computer science, who self-reported a medium level of computer expertise.

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

• A couple of weeks ago, we’ve introduced you to Chromixium OS, a Linux kernel-based operating system based on the latest LTS release of the Ubuntu distribution and designed to look and act like Google’s famous Chrome OS.

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• After several delays, the Mageia development team, through Rémi Verschelde, announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Mageia 5 Linux operating system, due for release sometime in May 2015.

• What an exciting weekend that just passed. First up, the long-awaited Debian GNU/Linux 8.0 “Jessie” was released in live and traditional installation media. Elsewhere, Mageia 5 Release Candidate was released with UEFI support and other installation improvements. In addition, LibreOffice 4.3.7 was released Saturday as well.

• While you wait for the download to complete, all restless and eager that you are to try this new release, let’s talk a bit about this release candidate: what can you expect of it, and why did it take so long?

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat (RHT) has rolled out the latest version of software tools to assist open source developers and administrators. Designed to complement the company’s flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the tools include the newest stable releases of many popular open source software packages.

Fedora

• Open for 10 years, after 40 millions about 1 year ago, the number of 66 millions of download RPM, from remi repository, or one of the 17 world mirrors, is already exceeded . So, more than 60,000 per day.

• We had Red Hack week in Red Hat last week. I was working with Jakub on Web software center project. We call it simply “Fedora software“. What is it? Who should be interested?

• The new Fedora, with its GNOME 3.16 interface, is an interesting, powerful Linux desktop.

• Now that the Beta version of the Fedora 22 Linux operating system is available for download and testing, the Fedora developers are discussing plans for the next release of the distribution, Fedora 23.

Debian Family

• For the first time since 2013 the Debian team have released a major upgrade of Debian, bumping it up to version 8. The new version has gone under the moniker ‘Jessie’, a continuation of the Toy Story themed names.

• The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, through Holger Levsen, announced the general availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming Debian Edu 8.0 distribution.

• The DEBIAN OPERATING SYSTEM has reached version 8.0 as the company announces the latest edition of the popular Linux distro.

• The Debian ‘Jessie’ release information says: “After almost 24 months of constant development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (codename Jessie), which will be supported for the next five years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.”

• Following nearly two years of “constant development”, Debian 8 ‘Jessie’ hit the Web this past weekend. As with Ubuntu 15.04 and its derivatives, all released last week, Debian 8’s most notable feature is the adoption of systemd. With this move, Gentoo becomes the final major distro that doesn’t ship with systemd as default.

• After being for almost two years in development, Debian 8 “Jessie” version is now released for download. Debian is a Unix-like computer operating system and a Linux distribution that is composed entirely of free and open-source software, most of which is under the GNU General Public License, and packaged by a group of individuals known as the Debian project.

• The Debian project is touting new ports for ARM and POWER architectures, a bunch of software updates, an upgraded Gnome desktop and better security in its just-unleashed Jessie release.

• However, El Reg fully expects that the switch to systemd as the default init system will divert at least some attention from the release.

• If your browser performs automatic updates of the extensions (the default), you should soon be upgraded to version 0.0.10 or later, bringing all those changes to your browser.

• Want to see more? multi-file editing? emacs and vim editing modes? in-browser storage of the modified files? that and more can be done, so feel free to join me and contribute to the Debian sources editor!

• Debian, one of the most widely used Linux distributions, has been updated with the release of Debian 8 ‘Jessie’, which now uses systemd to initialise the system and ships with updated versions of the Gnome desktop and numerous other enhancements.

• I decided to use the last hour of my day to install Debian GNU/Linux 8, Jessie, again, this time with defaults from “tasksel”: Debian desktop XFCE and “base utilities”. I did this in a virtual machine while grooving to a stream of my local “oldies” radio-station, checking the weather on the web, blogging, browsing the web and Beast’s CPU is barely above idling speed, and I’m nowhere near out of RAM. It’s all surreal compared to the work we had to do in the old days: downloading multiple .iso files, burning CDs, checking them for defects…, having the installation fail to boot or not start X, and the old systems ground away for an hour or more. Heck, Beast doesn’t even have a CD-drive these days.

• I wasn’t sure whether I would make it to Linuxdays Graz (GLT15) this year so I didn’t participate in its call for lectures. But when meeting folks on the evening before the main event I came up with the idea of giving a lightning talk as special kind of celebrating the Debian jessie release.

Derivatives

• Q4OS 1.2 “Orion” is the new release that is re-based on Debian Jessie, focused on shipping its own desktop utilities and customizations, and designed to run on both old and new hardware.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical loves to shake things up. After introducing Unity, HUD, Mir, Click and Snappy the sponsor of Ubuntu is now contemplating moving away from just .deb based desktop and adopting its own Snappy.

• The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition comes in a nice, fancy package, with the right dose of orange color. Inside the box, you will find a phone that’s neither too big nor too slim. It’s more like what the mainstream market used to offer a couple of years ago, which makes far more sense than the ultra-slippery models today. Aquaris reminds me of iPhone 4, not that I’m a great connoisseur of phones and what they should be like, but that’s how it is.

• Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system is probably the most widely used Linux distribution in the world. Ubuntu is made available in several editions, including desktop builds, server builds and there is a branch of Ubuntu for mobile phones. Ubuntu provides installation images for the x86, ARM and Power PC architectures, allowing the distribution to run on a wide variety of hardware. The most recent release of Ubuntu, version 15.04, includes a fairly short list of changes compared to last year’s Ubuntu 14.10, however some of the changes are significant. Some small changes include an upgrade of the kernel to Linux 3.19 and placing application menus inside the application window by default. A potentially larger change is the switch from Canonical’s Upstart init software to systemd.

Devices/Embedded

• These bring the GStreamer element up to date with new features added to raspivid since I first started the project, such as adding text annotations to the video, support for the 2nd camera on the compute module, intra-refresh and others.

• …so that’s sucked me into the world of spectrometers, reverse engineering the protocols to use them on Linux (oh, yeah, I need to publish that), binning leds by hand with a makeshift integration chamber…

• Marvell announced an “Ultra” version of its Android-focused Armada 1500 STB SoC that advances to a 64-bit, quad-core Cortex-A53 foundation for 4K delivery.

• The Armada 1500 Ultra (88DE3218) is designed to “enable PayTV operators and set-top box (STB) manufacturers to cost-effectively deliver small form factor devices with feature-rich 4K entertainment and gaming services,” says Armada. As with earlier Armada 1500 system-on-chips, it’s primarily focused on Android, with specific support for Android TV

• The founder and CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation talks about the Pi Model 2, and how Google’s Eric Schmidt convinced him to knock down the price.

Phones

Tizen

• Following on from the successful Tizen DevLabs in London and Paris, we have some great news for developers as the Tizen DevLab Series is coming to India, well specifically to Bangalore and Mumbai. If your a you’re a novice or an expert, a programmer or an innovator then you are welcome to come along, you could even find yourself winning a Samsung Z1.

• The hugely successful game Angry Birds is now available for the Tizen based Samsung Z1 Smartphone. The game is an Android App (equivalent to Android Angry Birds version 5.0.2.) that is running on the Z1 thanks to OpenMobile’s ACL technology.

• Angry Birds is an iconic game for MeeGo and Tizen as this one of the big games to be shown running on developer devices at Tizen developer events. The original game supports In-App purchases, but this doesn’t seem to be working with the Tizen Store, most likely a compatability issue. The gameplay is pretty good and any slowness can be attributed to the modest hardware of the Z1.

Android

• Don’t despair if you bought Samsung’s Gear 2 smartwatch, only to realize that you wanted the Android-powered Gear Live instead — there might be a solution in the works. XDA tinkerer biktor_gj has successfully loaded Android Wear on the Gear 2 after four months of work. It’s in a very rough state, as you might imagine. Only touch and rudimentary Bluetooth support are working right now. Android Wear doesn’t have an open source project the way that regular Android does, so any support for audio, the motion sensor and other features will likely be tricky to implement. Biktor is hopeful that he’ll get those working, however, and even this crude port is proof that your smartwatch isn’t necessarily limited to its original software.

• If you love your Android smartphone, now you can get a 4K Android TV from Sony.

• The HTC One M9 has just made it to the retail markets beginning April 10 and came out of the box already with Android 5.0.2 Lollipop on it.

• Over the space of 3 minutes – no exaggeration – I received the same email notification from 3 different TmoNews readers. All of them excited because T-Mobile’s promised roll out of the Android 5.0 Lollipop update for Galaxy Note 4 users has begun. Technically, it’s Android 5.0.1 and weighs in at a hefty 1086MB in size.

• A number of Android-supported devices are now able to get a taste of the software’s 5.1 update, thanks to the availability of custom firmwares.

• Going by hacker stereotypes, it’d be pretty easy to physically identify anyone committing an act of digital crime. A combination of pallid skin, hoody and laptop is the biggest giveaway. Such hackneyed images of hackers are, of course, evidently wrong, bordering on offensive. Real hackers penetrating business networks have the common sense to avoid cliched clothing and try to conceal their tools.

• A new study out this morning upsets the traditional thinking that iOS applications make more money for mobile developers when compared to those that run on Android devices. Instead, after taking into account the large number of non-Google Play Chinese Android app stores in existence, advisory firm Digi-Capital found that not only did Android dominate download volumes in 2014, it also made more money than iOS last year.

• Four years ago, your reporter paid for cookies with a mobile phone. Now, with Apple poised to bring some wrist action to bonking cash, we thought we’d take a look at how the competition has evolved.

• We’ve been trying Vodafone SmartPass, and discovered that things haven’t improved much over the last four years.

• When users visit supported websites — such as eBay, Pinterest, Vice News, and Product Hunt — they will be given an option to activate push notifications. Let’s take a closer look at why this update could be a game changer for Android devices.

• Welcome to the Sunday Giveaway, the place where we give away one of the best Android phones or tablets each and every Sunday.

• Galaxy Note 4 handsets on T-Mobile will be receiving Samsung’s latest Android 5.0 Lollipop software this week after the carrier confirmed the upgrade has finally been approved.

• At the end of last week, Google pushed an update to its Android System Webview service through Google Play that seems to be causing some pretty major issues on a number of handsets. At least, that’s the general consensus on why phones over the weekend began to notice all sorts of app crashes. If you jump into the Play listing for Android System Webview, you will see dozens of 1-star reviews for the service, many of which mention it specifically as the cause for recent problems.

• It’s been 7 years, and the great iOS vs Android debate rumbles on—in internet forums and real life. But these platforms have come a long way even in the last year or two. Do the old arguments still apply? What features separate iOS 8.3 from Android 5.1 Lollipop? We used a Nexus 6 and an iPhone 6 to investigate.

• With the month of April coming to a close, we want to take a look at what owners of Google’s Nexus smartphones and tablets need to know about the Nexus Android 5.1.1 update and release as we head into the month of May.

• After news reports last week claiming that the Galaxy S4 Mini would not be receiving the Android 5.0 Lollipop update, it is now confirmed that the update will indeed be released for the device.

• Today onwards we are starting what we call ‘Linux Wrap’. It’s a daily wrap-up of interesting and important Linux and Open Source stories.

• Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of the holding company of India’s Tata conglomerate, has acquired a stake in Xiaomi Technology [XTC.UL], a deal that is likely to bolster the Chinese phone maker’s presence in the world’s third-largest smartphone market.

• Soon after introducing the Canvas Spark (Q380) affordable Android 5.0 Lollipop-based smartphone, Micromax now appears set to launch another Canvas-series handset – the Canvas Play (Q355) – which is now listed on the company’s site. Unfortunately, there is no word on availability and pricing details of the Micromax Canvas Play.

• The iPhone is widely considered the “rich man’s phone,” but Android is finally beating Apple in one key metric — revenue.

• According to new data from Digi-Capital, for the first time, Android is making more money from apps than iOS is.

• Android has long beaten Apple in terms of absolute downloads, because it has a far larger install base. Last year, more than 1 billion Android handsets shipped, compared to a (relatively) paltry 192.7 million for the iPhone. But this is largely a vanity metric if it doesn’t translate into actual money, and the largest audience in the world won’t persuade developers to use your platform if there’s no way to monetise it.

Free Software/Open Source

• Sadly, these are often just empty words. “Patches welcome” can be a seemingly-polite way of saying “your problem is not important to me. Go solve it yourself and I’ll accept your solution.” And telling a user to go file a bug can be equally dismissive, especially if the bug-filing process is unpleasant.

• One of the most important, yet unsung, applications in a software developer’s life is the Make utility, or its equivalent. Make first appeared in 1977 and has been with us ever since. There are a very large number of build utilities, some based on Make, others completely different. The principle remains the same. The build system has a set of rules that tell it how to build an application from source files, usually fetched from a version control system. The Make utility reads the rules, then runs the compilers and linkers to do the build. The really good ones will run tests, as well.

• One of my favorite websites that illustrate this point is WhyLinuxIsBetter.net. As the page loads, you’re immediately presented with clear, easy to understand reasons why Linux is better than proprietary operating systems. Now granted, the website is a bit dated. But the overall message is timeless and positive. What this site does well is show its readers exactly why Linux on the desktop is awesome. From its features to its built-in safety, everything is clearly illustrated and easy to understand.

Events

• In just a few days we’ll have an open source conference in Oslo. I’m happy that we’ll have a Qt and KDE track, so I’d like to invite everyone to join for the weekend May 8-10 at the University of Oslo.

• Feast or famine: This is the typical modus operandi for FOSS shows, where Saturdays (or the “first days,” whatever they are) are a literal beehive of activity on the expo floor while talks are standing-room only. Sundays (or “second days”) — ah, those second days — the activity drops off a bit.

• [...]

• With Sunday being more low-key, I got to catch up with LibreOffice’s Robinson Tryon, who said that the show was a hit for the project. Without the cacophony of multiple conversations going on at the same time, like on Saturday, we got to talk about advances LibreOffice is making in Android, which is going faster than expected, and various aspects of document freedom, not the least of which is the successful growth of Document Freedom Day. Heady days are in store for LibreOffice.

• That’s right. The teams behind Xen Project Developer Summit and KVM Forum recently announced plans to co-host a hackathon and social event on August 18, 2015, at the close of the Xen Project Developer Summit and on the eve of KVM Forum. Virtualization is one of the most important technologies in IT today, so it makes perfect sense for the two best hypervisor projects to collaborate and socialize at an event that celebrates their similarities and bridges that gap between all things KVM and Xen.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Canonical revealed details about a number of LibreOffice vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which also upgrades the office suite.

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3.7 “Still”, the seventh minor release of the LibreOffice 4.3 family, which is now the suggested version of the software for large deployments in the enterprise and for conservative users. LibreOffice 4.3.7 contains over 100 bug fixes.

Education

• One of our hardware donors emailed me and asked if I would come to Austin and pick up a dozen Optiplex 745s with 17 inch monitors and accompanying keyboards. These Dells already had scrubbed drives and had either 4 or 8 GB of RAM, depending on what they were originally assigned to do. I said I most certainly would and arranged a time to be there. This donor has been especially generous to us, and not with just decent hardware. They also present us an annual Christmas cash donation of $1000. On the years they do employee matching, it is more than that — a lot more.

Healthcare

• But what software to use on the specialized tablets and on the server where critical information is stored? Enter the OpenMRS community, who drives the world’s largest open source project to develop health information technology for resource-constrained environments.

• An accurate, up to the minute, accessible medical record system is fundamental to effective treatment and tracking of the Ebola virus. But how to create this type of system in the rudimentary, overwhelmed Ebola care centers of West Africa where paper records or computers — even if they were available — couldn’t be carried in and out of treatment areas?

Funding

• Over the next seven years, the EU is funding ICT programmes in Malta with some EUR 38 million, the government of Malta announced in March. The funds are part of a EUR 400 million package earmarked to finance socio-economic development in the country. ICT is seen as one of the main ‘enablers’ for development and innovation in Malta.

BSD

• Nice to see recognition from the trenches of bureaucracy.

Public Services/Government

• The report also suggests promoting open-source software as a way to build resilience to surveillance, which could be achieved by funding audits of important open-source software. Among several products it highlights is disk encryption software, TrueCrypt, which was recently subjected to a crowd-funded audit that was able to rule out the existence of NSA backdoors in the product.

• “TrueCrypt is a typical example of a problem of the commons: worldwide use of software package was probably dependent on two or three developers,” the study notes to highlight why funding open source projects may be valuable.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Nearly 4,000 people have been counted dead and nearly 7,000 injured since a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook Nepal on Saturday. A crucial need in any rescue effort — perhaps just as important to saving lives as medical supplies, food, and tents — is an up-to-date map that humanitarian workers can use to more efficiently navigate the rubble.

Open Hardware

• Imagination is releasing a free version of its Linux-ready MIPS MicroAptiv CPU to universities called “MIPSfpga,” which will offer fully transparent RTL.

Programming

• Calm yourselves, readers. The Spring 2015 C++ Standards Committee Meeting takes place next week in Lenexa, Kansas. And at that meeting much of the discussion is expected to consider C++ 17, a major revision of the programming language due in 2017.

• Atom Shell is now called Electron. You can learn more about Electron and what people are building with it at its new home electron.atom.io.

Leftovers

UK Elections

• Indeed if the total number of votes cast in the UK for Tories plus Lib Dems is equal to the total number of votes cast in the UK for Labour plus Scot Nats (which is more or less what the polls are showing), then Labour plus the Scot Nats will win approximately 35 more seats than the rival bloc for the same total votes, entirely because of the Lib Dem veto on the Boundary Commission proposals.

• Like the British public, the vast majority of MPs had no idea about the extent of bulk data collection by the security services when whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke out. With the election pending, what do parliamentary candidates think there needs to be done about mass surveillance?

• Whereas the “equal time” allowed the SNP candidate included BBC commentary giving direct personal criticism of her, there was no critical note in the Alexander side of the coverage. An interesting example of how the state propaganda system works.

Security

• WordPress 4.2.1 is now available. This is a critical security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

• The use of encryption continues to grow, yet managing keys across fragmented encryption implementations remains a challenge.

• The Ponemon Institute’s annual survey of business and IT managers found that 34 percent of more than 4,700 survey respondents use encryption extensively.

Finance

Censorship

• Back in 2010 we wrote about rapper Dan Bull’s excellent “Death to ACTA” song and video, which is a parody of Jay-Z’s “Death of Autotune.” In 2011, we further wrote about the MP3 of that song (which Bull distributes willingly on file sharing platforms) being taken down from Mediafire due to a questionable takedown request. Now, years later (well after ACTA is pretty much long dead), Dan’s discovered that his video on YouTube was just silenced due to copyright claims.

Privacy

• Ever written out a status update or comment but decided against posting it? One techie has claimed Facebook collects this content, despite the company’s claims to the contrary

• Unlike in Windows and Mac OS X, you can only encrypt your disk when you first install Linux. If you already have Linux installed without disk encryption, you’re going to need to backup your data and reinstall Linux. While there’s a huge variety of Linux distributions, I’m going to use Ubuntu as an example, but setting up disk encryption in all major distributions is similar.

• Move over Skype, Google Hangouts, and FaceTime. Facebook wants to host your next mobile video chat.

• The technology is not being “exploited” by terrorists, it’s being used by them, just as they use telephones or microwaves or washing machines. That’s what those devices are there for. The idea that trying to make broken internet technologies should be “front and center” of technology companies’ thinking bespeaks a complete contempt for their users.

• This constant refrain about how awful strong crypto is, and how we must break it, is simply the intelligence services implicitly admitting that they find the idea of doing their job in a free society, where people are able to keep some messages private, too hard, so they would be really grateful if technology companies could just fall in line and make life easier by destroying privacy for everyone.

Civil Rights

• A man taking a stroll through his neighborhood was tackled and arrested by a Missouri police officer when he refused to identify himself, even though the cop did not have a reasonable suspicion that he was involved in a crime.

• The incident took place in September in Breckenridge Hills, a municipality of St. Louis County with less than 5,000 residents, not too far from Ferguson.

Intellectual Monopolies

Treaties

• It’s been a couple of months since my last TTIP update. That hiatus reflects the talks themselves, which feel strangely suspended. That’s not to say nothing is happening: indeed, there’s an air of desperate busy-ness beginning to creep into the proceedings as even the most fervid supporter of the agreement realises that TTIP is not going to be finished by the end of 2015, and people rush around vainly trying to do something about it. That’s pretty astonishing when you remember that the original plan was to finish it by the end of 2014:

• President Obama is apparently quite annoyed by the fact that his own party is basically pushing against his “big trade deals” (that are not really about trade). Senator Elizabeth Warren has been pretty aggressive in trashing the TPP agreement, highlighting the fact that the agreement is still secret (other than the bits leaked by Wikileaks). In response, President Obama came out swinging against the critics of TPP arguing that “they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

• So all economists are for TPP because TPP is a “free trade” bill and all economists are for “free trade.” Simple, right? The only reason Congress wouldn’t pass fast track, Mankiw suggests, is if politicians listened to voters who were “worse than ignorant about the principles of good policy.”

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