● 05.29.15

● Links 29/5/2015: ALT Linux 7.0.5, Google I/O 2015

Posted in News Roundup at 5:51 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Quite simply, most of us use desktop Linux because it’s superior to all other brands, including Windows and OS X — even including Unix and the BSDs. This is a fact, not an opinion. There are reasons why Linux runs a majority of the worlds servers and powers most big enterprises, and in an example of where the trickle down theory actually works, those reasons trickle down (or up — depending on your viewpoint) to the desktop.

Desktop

• The openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, had the great pleasure of informing us that approximately 45,000 students from an Indonesian province are currently testing a pilot program powered by openSUSE Linux.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Developers working on the open-source Exynos DRM driver for supporting the display block found on Samsung’s Exynos ARM SoCs are up to their 9th version of patches for providing atomic mode-setting support.

• Alex Deucher of AMD has filed his main pull request today for the Radeon DRM driver updates to be integrated in the upcoming Linux 4.2 kernel.

Applications

• A new version of the famous Calibre eBook editor, viewer, and converter has been released, and the developer has further improved the DOCX functionality that was made available a short while ago.

Proprietary

• Surprisingly, a lot of people who want to write expect to start perfectly, so they think that if they have the proper tools right from the beginning, then it will actually be easier to take up writing. This is the reason there are quite a few applications out there that focus on stuff like writing goals, for example, and that try to provide the minimum number of features that a writer might need.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I am always hesitant to cover any crowdfunding campaigns, but I think Voxelnauts has just won me over. All development is done on Linux, they have video’s showing it, and it looks like a great game.

• It’s another game that takes advantage of the excellent DOSBox project, and after my testing it’s flawless work from GOG to make it “just work” as usual. GOG’s commitment to getting Linux a lot of classic games pleases me, and I hope we soon have all the classics using DOSBox that Windows has. It’s only a matter of time!

• Heroes of Loot is a 2D dungeon crawler with twin stick like shooting, I’ve taken a little look so that you know what to expect.

• Umbra is a new hack ‘n’ slash RPG built on the CRYENGINE that looks absolutely stunning. It will be released on the PC and Linux platforms if the developers will get enough funds on Kickstarter.

• The beta for 2.5D physics puzzler Unmechanical was announced a couple of weeks ago, and is now available for all owners of the game on Steam. An extended version of the game was released for PlayStation 3 and 4, and Xbox One earlier this year, but is so far not available for PC.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Layers feature is almost done. A list of layers is being generated in the left sidebar and toggling visibility of layers is also working.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME project is sad to have learnt that Marco Pesenti Gritti recently passed away after a long fight with cancer. Marco made major contributions to GNOME, having been the original author of both the Epiphany (also known as “Web”) browser and Evince, the GNOME PDF reader. Besides his significant contributions and technical ability, Marco was known as a good friend who served as an inspiration to many within the community.

• Members of the GNOME community have expressed their sadness at Marco’s death. Xan López, the current Epiphany maintainer, wrote: “I remember fondly working with Marco on Epiphany many years ago. His patience and good character were instrumental in getting me involved with GNOME and Free Software”. Another contributor, Tomeu Vizoso, said: “He reviewed my first patches ever to a free software project and his contagious enthusiasm was what put into motion my career in open source.”

• GNOME wasn’t the only community that Marco was a part of: he also played an important role in the development of Sugar, a platform which focused on education and the developing world.

• Our thoughts are with Marco’s family and friends at this difficult time.

• The GNOME developers are still preparing for the release of the second milestone towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.

Distributions

• At the request of many users, the Kali Linux developers are proud to announce the immediate availability of Docker images for the Kali Linux operating system, helping users run Kali on various OSes.

Reviews

• Bodhi Linux is a distribution I have followed for a number of years. I used to have it installed on my Acer Aspire Netbook and it featured in my list of “12 great distributions for netbooks” article that I wrote back in October 2013.

• The point of Bodhi Linux is to get out of your way and let you decide which applications are installed on your computer.

• I gave my previous review of Bodhi Linux the title “Quick but Quirky”.

• The reason for that title was that the desktop whilst whizzing along quite nicely had a few strange Enlightenment-isms which would have made it a probably no-no for beginners.

• How does the latest version measure up? Read on and find out.

• I have run Ubuntu 15.04 since the day it was made available, and while it was a great release, one decision by Ubuntu is ruining it for me.

New Releases

• Andrei Cherepanov had the great pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release of the Russian ALT Linux 7.0 operating system.

• The IPFire team had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, May 28, the immediate availability for download of IPFire 2.17 Core Update 90, a major version that brings a number of new features, updated packages, a new kernel, and various security enhancements.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Softpedia was among the first to report a few days ago the sad news that the French Mandriva S.A. company that developed, maintained, and distributed the popular Mandriva Linux operating system is in the process of being liquidated.

• It’s with a heavy heart that I report that Mandriva Linux is no more. Mandrake Linux, as it was known in the beginning, was the Linux distribution that freed my computer from the lock-in and insecurity of proprietary alternatives. While saddened, no one is really surprised at this last whimper. Mandriva suffered financial issues for nearly the entirety of its existence, even filing bankruptcy at least once. Fortunately, with projects like Mageia and OpenMandriva, Mandrake Linux will live on in more than just our memories.

• Good news everyone, a new version of OpenMandriva is ready to see the world in a few days, 2014.2 will soon bemaking its way to you. Listen out for details, features – and torrents!

• Yesterday we learned that Mandriva, the company, was shutting down. I read a lot of sad comments on Twitter about it and realized that few of those guys seemed to be aware that actually Mandriva, the company, wasn’t doing a Linux distribution anymore for several years. The Mandriva Linux distribution, which earlier forked as PCLinuxOS, Mageia and others, is now OpenMandriva.

Slackware Family

• During the previous couple of weeks I enjoyed several long weekends due to national holidays, and so it happened that I could spend some time re-visiting the calibre.SlackBuild and updating it so that it was able to compile a package for Calibre 2.x.

Red Hat Family

• The Red Hat Cloud Adoption survey also revealed that many companies fear their applications won’t be suitable for deployment into IaaS or PaaS.

Fedora

• I’ve been working on generating appstream data for RPMFusion packages recently. At the moment, since only Fedora packages provide appstream data, only they can be installed using Gnome software – for RPMFusion packages, a user must use another package manager – DNF and so on. Considering that a lot of the packages in RPMFusion are media player front-ends and things, it’d make it a lot easier for users if these were also listed in Gnome software. I spent a number of hours today writing appstream data files for the RPMFusion packages – both in the free and non free repositories. I believe I’ve written appstream data files for all packages that could be listed in Gnome software now. (They’re hosted here in the Github repository I set up for this purpose). I had already generated initial RPM packages for the free and non free repositories and submitted review tickets to RPMFusion. They’re still unassigned, so if you are a package maintainer with a few free cycles, please consider reviewing them. They are really simple reviews.

• Fedup right now is the command for handling in-place Fedora upgrades from release-to-release and it’s been around since Fedora 17. However, with the Fedora 23 release due out in late 2015, that utility will likely be replaced with a new version to handle upgrading to new releases.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In case you missed the latest news, Jonathan Riddell has been accused by the Ubuntu Community Council (CC) of breaking Ubuntu Code of Conduct (CoC) and has been asked to resign from his position of leader of the Kubuntu project (a title which actually does not exist and which he never claimed to hold)

• I had the chance of meeting Jonathan when I joined Canonical in 2009. I was a bit intimidated during my first Canonical real-life meeting, but Jonathan carried me around and went out of his way to introduce me to many of my then new colleagues.

• Since then he has always been one of the friendliest person I know. We often shared rooms during Canonical, Ubuntu or KDE events and went on to be colleagues again at Blue Systems. I believe Jonathan kindness is one of the reasons why the Kubuntu community has grown into such a welcoming and closely-knit group of people.

• This month’s Ubuntu Phone Update sent over-the-air is bringing a number of new features and improvements for Ubuntu smartphone users over the next few days.

Flavours and Variants

• As you may already know, the Linux Mint Team is maintaining both the Linux Mint systems, based on Ubuntu, and the Linux Mint Debian Edition systems, based on Debian.

• Animesoft International, the developers of the Mangaka Project, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution designed primarily for fans of Japanese anime and manga, have announced a new Alpha release of the next major version of the distro.

Devices/Embedded

• Freescale’s dual- and quad-core “Plus” i.MX6 SoCs boost graphic performance and RAM support, while the single-core Cortex-A7 “UltraLite” targets secure IoT.

• Freescale Semiconductor announced three new versions of its popular i.MX6 SoCs, all of which will be backed with Linux BSPs and evaluation kits. The new i.MX6 DualPlus and i.MX6 QuadPlus system-on-chips offer optimized GPUs and memory support, but keep the same 21 x 21mm packages, and remain with the same allotment of Cortex-A9 cores. They offer full software and pin compatibility with earlier i.MX6 models, says Freescale.

Phones

Tizen

• The Samsung Open Source Group (OSG) have created a Getting started guide that has been tested on Linux Mint 17, and most of it should also work for Ubuntu. It shows you the prerequisites that you need as well as showing you step by step Instructions on how to install the Tizen SDK. You get to setup a test device and get familiar to the new environment that you will be soon calling your new home.

• The Speed Truck was the third most downloaded game from the Tizen store during April 2015. The file size is only 0.65MB which takes not take up too much space, version 1.2.0. You can drive your BigFoot truck across the desert and compete against other truck racers whilst keeping an eye on your trucks health and the time limit. There will be power ups along the way to help you to enhance your speed against other players.

Android

• We’ve gotten our first official look at Android M, and it offers scores of subtle improvements that promise to make using Android 6.0 a whole lot better. It’s evolutionary, not revolutionary—which is exactly what Android 6.0 needs to be.

• The way Android handles your privacy isn’t perfect, and various studies have shown that apps can and will take advantage of the way you set up app permissions to mine personal data for commercial purposes. However, a new leak indicates that Android M will offer users better privacy by introducing new features that’ll give them granular app permission control.

• Lenka, the black-and-white photo app by photographer Kevin Abosch that has taken the monochrome shooting set by storm, has now released an Android version.

• Standalone streaming service will be available in Google Play store

• As promised back in March, the Nvidia Shield Android TV console is coming this month — today, in fact. The company has announced it’s now available to order from Amazon, Best Buy, and its own website.

• Today at Google I/O 2015 Google detailed its plan to roll Android into the home and everyday devices. Meet Brillo and Weave. Together, these two software products will power and allow Internet of Things devices.

• It was two years ago at Google I/O 2013 that the company originally announced Android Studio, a new integrated development environment (IDE) for Android apps. Six months ago, Google announced that the product was ready to move out of beta, but Android Studio 1.0 still couldn’t do all of the things that the old Eclipse ADT could do. Most notably, developers that used Google’s Native Development Kit (NDK) to use C and C++ code in their apps were left out in the cold.

• First up is Brillo, an Android-derived operating system for IoT devices. Brillo is smaller and slimmer than Android, providing a kernel, hardware abstraction, connectivity, and security infrastructure. The company didn’t talk technical details, so the range of systems-on-chips supported and specific hardware requirements are currently unknown; previous rumors estimated that it would go as low as 32 or 64 MB of RAM, making it a lot smaller than regular Android.

• USB Type-C is still a rarity today, but as the year goes on, the new port is going to begin showing up in more and more devices. In anticipation of this, Google has introduced a handful of features in the Android M release to support some of Type-C’s new features.

• Google is combining all of its login and identity solutions into a single platform today under the ‘Google Identity Platform‘ moniker. What’s more interesting than that, though, is that Google is launching the Smart Lock Passwords Manager today, which will make it easier for users to sign in to third-party Android apps that implement this service.

• We’re pretty enthusiastic around here for the all-new Google Photos, and now it’s available to everyone to try. On the web, you can visit it at photos.google.com. Or you can download the app for Android or iOS. The new service, which has “graduated” from Google+, now offers unlimited storage of photos up to 16 megapixels and video shot in 1080p. You can also store higher-resolution imagery in Google Photos, though it will count against the 15 GB of free storage you get with your Google account.

• As you read this, Google I/O will currently be raging on—and hopefully just wrapping up the keynote. A few days before the show, however, Nvidia invited us to check out the Nvidia Shield—the company’s first entry into the Android TV market.

• Google officially unveiled Android M today from their I/O 2015 conference today.

• Swisscom has signed 500,000 customers onto its Swisscom TV 2.0 IPTV platform since April 2014 when the company introduced its next-generation offer based on open source Android and featuring a new UEX, network DVR to the set-top box and unified STB and multiscreen service delivery. In its annual report in February, the telco listed 1.17 million television customers (including those on the ‘legacy’ Swisscom TV 1.0) and 306,000 people using TV 2.0. The company is predicting a 2-3 year migration (from April 2014) to the new solution before it switches off its original IPTV platform.

• That will become a question for millions more people this summer as Google’s new digital wallet system, Android Pay, becomes active.

• Google announced Android Pay at the Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

• If you purchased a 2015 Hyundai Sonata with a factory-installed navigation system, and have a smartphone with the Android Lollipop 5.0 or higher operating system, you can integrate your car with the new Android Auto software.

• At its developer conference I/O 2015, Google today unveiled Android M, the latest iteration to its mobile operating system. The update brings with it a handful of interesting features and other improvements. The full-fledged version of Android M will roll-out sometime later this year, but for those who want a sneak peek a developer preview version of Android M for select Nexus devices is out now. Here’s how you can install it on your smartphone or tablet.

• Google has launched new features for its Google Play store to make it easier for parents to find Android apps, games and videos for children.

• At Google I/O, the company’s annual developer event in San Francisco, Google announced a new version of Android Wear.

• The update will make items more glanceable, actionable and effortless. Android Wear will now allow you to leave apps permanently on your device in a low-power black and white mode.

• After loading Google’s first developer preview of Android M onto a Nexus 6, we’ve just had our first peek at what’s to come when the big update is ready for consumer release in Q3. For starters, most of the most important features that Google announced today are nowhere to be found. The very cool Now on Tap feature isn’t yet active (hopefully that’ll come in a later preview update), Android Pay’s not yet ready, and obviously the Nexus 6 isn’t going to do much in the way of scanning fingerprints. So what’s left? Well, the first developer preview shows that Google has been working to refine and polish the work that began in Android 5.0 Lollipop.

• As Google opens its annual I/O software developer conference this morning in San Francisco, it will be looking to extend its reach even further beyond the computer and the smartphone.

• The battle for the living room (i.e, controlling the television experience) is heating up with forays from multiple vendors. As the cord-cutting trend gains momentum, the time seems to be right for disruption. Roku has been around for a long time and they continue to taste success with inexpensive and small over-the-top set-top boxes (OTT STBs). At the other end of the spectrum is the Apple TV, which, despite just being a ‘hobby’, has managed to move millions of units. Google had tried to make inroads into this market a few years back with the Google TV / Logitech Revue, but, it unfortunately didn’t pan out as expected. Chromecast turned out to be more popular in their second attempt, but it was a limited play. In late 2014, Google launched Android TV along with the Nexus Player.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• The Linux Foundation in conjunction The Apache Software Foundation has announced Apache: Big Data, an inaugural conference to take place on September 28-30 in Budapest, Hungary.

• The Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota will be hosting a Moodle conference sponsored by the main organization behind the Moodle project. “MoodleMoot US” will run Aug. 4-6 in Minneapolis and feature Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas as well as speakers from higher ed and K-12 sharing how they use open source tools, including the Moodle open source course management system, in education.

• This 3-day seminar focuses on how Linux has been adapted for use in embedded environments, with specific emphasis on the ARM architecture. Through extensive hands-on lab work, you learn how to install a cross-development environment, build a compact version of Linux for an embedded device, install the build on the target system, and test its operation. You’ll create and test programs that exercise I/O as well as networking applications .

• Core counts keep rising, and that means that the Linux kernel continues to encounter interesting performance and scalability issues. Which is not a bad thing, since it has been well over ten years since the “free lunch” of exponential CPU-clock frequency increases came to an abrupt end. This microconference will therefore look at futex scaling, address-space scaling, improvements to queued spinlocks, additional lockless algorithms, userspace per-CPU critical sections, and much else besides.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• On May 27, Penny MacNeil from the Google Chrome development team was happy to announce the promotion of the Google Chrome 44 web browser from the Dev channel to the Beta one for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Mozilla

• Today we are happy to inform you that Mozilla has published some details about the next major version of its popular, cross-platform, and free web browser, Mozilla Firefox 39.0.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Maybe my memory is blurred due to the fact, that the seperation of firmware from the Linux kernel, and proper firmware loading got implemented only years later. I remember the discussion about the pwc driver and its removal from Linux. Maybe the situation wasn’t better at that time but the firmware was just hidden inside the Linux driver code?

Licensing

• Since its resurfacing as an open source project in 2008, Dolphin has been licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). This license, created in 1991, is still a fairly common license used in the open source world. But as with anything that deals with technology, times are changing at a rapid rate. More recent projects are using GNU Public License version 3 and Apache 2.0, for their additional freedoms, protections from outside liability, and improved inter-license compatibility. Unfortunately these newer licenses are not compatible with GPLv2, and any project using these licenses cannot link to Dolphin and thus, Dolphin cannot link to them.

Openness/Sharing

• Apps implementation and open government data use and re-use, are examples of it, and Open & Smart Government are nowadays trends where technology has an important role. In this paper we explore this perspective, with special focus in the open innovation within the city.

Open Hardware

• Over the past few years we have seen rapid progress in the use of 3D printing to create low cost alternatives to traditional prostheses for amputees. The latest development involves the exiii team from Japan whom we previously reported on for their handii device. In review, the team is made up of former Sony and Panasonic engineers, they set out to create a low cost myoelectric prosthesis that was not only functional but also stylish and customizable. The result of the efforts is the HACKberry, a sleek and functional $300 prosthesis made up of 3D printed components and myoelectric sensors. The sensors interact with a smartphone to actuate the fingers of the device. The design won them a James Dyson award in 2013.

• Then, in 2014, Chris read about an organisation called e-NABLE, a 5000-strong international group of 3D-printing enthusiasts. Using open-source prosthetic designs, these volunteers print and assemble prosthetic hands and arms costing as little as £40. Those wanting a prosthesis send through photos, measurements and other specifications. The organisation then matches recipients with volunteers.

Programming

• SourceForge didn’t stop at taking over the GIMP account and locking Simončič out, they also manipulated the software and wrapped it inside an ad-infested installer. I checked yesterday and it was indeed adware. Unfortunately I didn’t bother to grab a screenshot and I regret it now. Today when I checked, the package had been updated and it’s now ad-free. There is no changelog on SourceForge so I can’t see what changes were made to the package, but I can see that the last update was made today.

• Like them or not, emojis are turning into the mobile era’s lingua franca. Now a project called emojidex is offering “emojis-as-a-service,” with a platform that lets developers share new emojis with each other and add them to their websites and apps.

• An international trade agreement under negotiation with Australia, the United States, the European Union and others may have wide-ranging implications for the technology users, according to civil liberties groups.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has analysed leaked drafts of texts for the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA) written in February this year, and claims it would prohibit countries involved from forcing vendors to disclose source code used for applications in their equipment.

• Forget the dotcom bubble burst of the noughties; never before has the promise of a digital economy ranked so highly in the global marketplace. Having faced significant downturns over the last decade or so, many economies – the UK, Portugal and Iceland, to name a few – have spawned a new wave of digital entrepreneurs.

• Those who perhaps found themselves out of a job, or facing unprecedented levels of competition for limited employment opportunities after education, have created their own jobs and companies, bringing new found energy and increased competitiveness into the enterprise sector.

• In advance of Google I/O later this week, Twitter is making both Twitter Kit and its telephone sign-on tool Digits open source on GitHub for Android developers.

• Over the 2015 Easter holiday the Scribe project received more than 3000 stars (a combination of bookmarking, liking and favouriting) on Github, making it easily one of the most popular open-source projects we have created at the Guardian.

• In addition to that milestone we also celebrated the release to our internal production systems of a number of community-contributed changes to Scribe. Guardian journalists now benefit every day from participation in the open-source community!

Leftovers

Security

• Docker Hub is a central repository for Docker developers to pull and push container images. We performed a detailed study on Docker Hub images to understand how vulnerable they are to security threats. Surprisingly, we found that more than 30% of official repositories contain images that are highly susceptible to a variety of security attacks (e.g., Shellshock, Heartbleed, Poodle, etc.). For general images – images pushed by docker users, but not explicitly verified by any authority – this number jumps up to ~40% with a sampling error bound of 3%.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Harper government has manipulatively invoked the threat of ISIS to create unreasonable societal fear, so that it can advance an imperial agenda beneath the cover of lies and deceptions.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Finance

• The author of a key report commissioned by German Finance Minister Sigmar Gabriel on possible reforms for the controversial ISDS-mechanism, has said while the report offers some suggestions for reforming the mechanism in the future, he still does not see the need for ISDS in TTIP.

• If you want to understand what’s really happening in Greece and Ukraine, just follow the money

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Billionaire Pete Peterson is spending lots of money to get people to worry about the debt and deficits, and National Public Radio is doing its part to try to promote Peterson’s cause with a Morning Edition piece that began by telling people that the next president “will have to wrestle with the federal debt.”

• This is not true, but Peterson apparently hopes that he can distract the public from the factors that will affect their lives, most importantly the upward redistribution of income, and obsess on the country’s relatively small deficit. (A larger deficit right now would actually promote growth and employment.)

Privacy

• In many EU countries, entire herds of cattle are carefully “micro-chipped” so the animals can be monitored. What if we did the same to people? It would be difficult to become a criminal or (gulp) a terrorist!

• Obviously, nobody is going to allow that to happen. For now, we’ll just have to track our dogs, though our phones already track us quite a bit.

Civil Rights

• National Review editor Rich Lowry advocated for mass incarceration and “disproportionate police attention” toward “dangerous, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods” in response to a spike in murders in Baltimore.

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