● 06.02.15

● Links 2/6/2015: Black Lab Linux Releases, Krita Fundraiser

Posted in News Roundup at 8:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Dell is making a push to enter the Internet of Things ecosystem, and it’s doing so with a new device aptly named Dell IoT Gateway, which is powered by Ubuntu Core, among other things.

• Not that many years ago, buying a new PC meant spending hundreds of dollars just for an entry level machine. Fortunately these days the barrier to entry has been greatly reduced.

• Thanks to innovations in lower end computing options, one can get a brand new computer for the price of a steak dinner. The most commonly known of these lower-end computing options is known as the Raspberry Pi.

• I’ve spent the last decade introducing people to Linux. These weren’t “here-this-is-a-live-Linux-CD-figure-it-out-yourself-and-good-luck” encounters. We’re talking face-to-face interactions, and often those interactions took place for more than an hour. Sometimes in two or three sessions. I’ve had a chance to see and hear people’s wide range of first reactions to Linux on the desktop, and there is no way to misinterpret those reactions:

• Linux on the desktop will often float or sink just from the way it appears to the beholder in the first minute.

Desktop

• Anyone who needs proof only needs to look at what Dell is doing these days. It’s cutting the chain that has bound them exclusively to Redmond and placing heavy bets on Ubuntu.

Server

• There’s a heavy level of vendor involvement in Docker and containers, covering more than 60 different companies engaged in development and deployment, management, orchestration, security, and shipping of application containers, based on a new 451 Research report. Many vendors and projects cross over into more than one of these areas, and it’s likely even more players will become involved.

• A short while ago I was reviewing one of my Twitter lists and I happened upon a tweet that led me to NethServer, an open source project that featured a product the likes of which I had been looking for in recent months.

Kernel Space

• A leap second is an adjustment that is once in a while applied to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to keep it close to the mean solar time. The concept is similar to that of leap day, but instead of adding a 29th day to February to keep the calendar synchronized with Earth’s orbit around the Sun, an extra second 23:59:60 is added to the last day of June or December to keep the time of the day synchronized with the Earth’s rotation relative to the Sun. The mean solar day is about 2 milliseconds longer than 24 hours and in long term it’s getting longer as the Moon is constantly slowing down the Earth’s rotation.

• Kernel 4.1 RC6 has been released, being a big release, full of updated drivers for SCSI, GPU, RAID, DM, and networking, architecture enhancements, XFS, OverlayFS and CIFS improvements, networking patches and updated documentation.

Graphics Stack

• The Linux 4.2 kernel will bring continued enablement on Intel’s next-gen Skylake architecture, low-power display states, basic enablement of Broxton hardware, DisplayPort improvements, the Gen7 command parser was finally added, dynamic page-table allocation for Gen8+ graphics hardware, and many other internal driver changes.

Applications

• kornelix has just released a new version of its Fotoxx open source and free photo and image editing and collection management software for GNU/Linux operating systems.

• Due to a reported problem with the configure script, I updated the source tarball of FisicaLab, included the Mac package. Now the current package is numbered 0.3.5-1. Sorry for the inconveniences.

• The new version 1.5.0 for test purposes is now based on Qt 5.2.Some features comes with this version…

• As you may know, GNU Octave is an open-source, Matlab alternative. The software provide capabilities for numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems and has graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation.

Proprietary

• As you may know, Google did not create an official Google Drive client for Linux yet. There was a tool called Grive, but it does not work anymore, since Google has changed its API recently.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Following in the foot steps of Wine 1.7.44, the newest development version of Wine-Staging is now also available.

Games

• Serpent in the Staglands is a pretty interesting looking CRPG that has recently released for Linux. It actually looks a bit like the old Baldur’s Gate games, but plays out quite differently.

• Siralim is a crisp looking 2D RPG with Roguelike elements that has just been updated to include Linux support!

• I’ve taken some time to take a look at Warlocks Vs Shadows which is a really great looking 2D side-scrolling action RPG.

• It’s worth noting that the game is currently in Early Access, so things are subject to change, and it will probably have bugs.

• 2K Games has just announced that XCOM 2 will arrive this November and that there will also be a Linux port of the game handled by Feral Interactive.

• It seems that XCOM 2 has been announced after a teaser campaign by 2K. The AdventFuture.org website 2K brought online last week was now confirmed to be about XCOM and the reveal trailer was published. And best of all, there’s a tiny little penguin and a certain feline as a mark of Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Packages for the release of KDE Applications 15.04.1 are available for Kubuntu 15.04. You can get it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

• My work this summer will revolve around offering OpenStreetMap( OSM ) support to Marble: this will involve offering the user a complete experience: from opening OSM files, to viewing and editing them, to finally exporting them in “.osm” files.

• As I mentioned before my GSoC proposal titled Better Tooling for Baloo has been accepted.

• One of the reasons why I choose KDE as my mentoring organization is that I already used their Plasma desktop for quite a while now, thus I’m a little familiar with KDE Applications, but the main reason is that my programming skills and knowledge was best matched with KDE’s Marble project.

• So I got a slot for GSOC2015 to implement a “Checker framework” for KDevelop, therefore I have been and I will be working on it during the summer.

• The current score is €2675 donated through paypal and €28,463 pledged on Kickstarter! That’s a total if €31,138. That’s seven-and-half stretch goals! Two, however, are already claimed by the choose-your-stretch-goal award.

Distributions

New Releases

• Black Lab Software had the great pleasure of informing us earlier today, June 1, about the immediate availability for download of the fourth service release (SR) of the Black Lab Enterprise, Education and Forensics Desktop 6 distributions.

• After having informed us about the immediate availability of Black Lab Linux Enterprise Desktop 6 SR4, Black Lab Software has had the great pleasure of sending us details about the fourth service release of their Black Lab Linux Education Desktop 6 distribution.

• Portable Linux operating system based on the Linux Live Scripts, Porteus Kiosk Edition, has been upgraded to version 3.4.0 and is now available for download.

• The final version of the antiX 15 Linux operating system will be released very soon, but until then we can test the Beta 3 pre-release version that has been announced today, June 1, 2015.

Arch Family

• It’s June 1st, so it is time to get your hands on a new ISO build of the world’s most customizable, lightweight and acclaimed GNU/Linux operating system, Arch Linux.

Red Hat Family

• An outspoken champion of that message is Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Raleigh-based Red Hat Software, the high-profile, $10 billion provider of open source software to the enterprise community. In his new book, “The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance,” Whitehurst argues that “Red Hat is the only company that can say that it emerged out of a pure bottom-up culture—namely, the open source ethos—and learned how to execute it at scale.”

• This marks the third year in a row that Rachel Cassidy, vice president of Global Partner Enablement, and Margaret-Ann Bolton, senior director of Global Partner Marketing, have been recognized by CRN for their leadership, vision, and dedication to channel programs. In addition, this marks the second year in a row that Cassidy has been recognized as one of CRN’s Power 100. The Power 100 spotlights an elite subset of Women of the Channel honorees whose insight and influence in their respective companies help drive channel success.

Fedora

• Fedora 23 might be featuring some new ISO spins of the Linux distribution, including one with the Cinnamon Desktop and a “Netizen” spin focused on “Internet citizenship and citizen engagement.”

• The proposed Fedora 23 Cinnamon spin is quite self explanatory and is outlined further via this Fedora Wiki page. The Cinnamon Desktop is already packaged within Fedora repositories but this is about shipping an easy-to-deply Fedora Cinnamon experience rather than first having to install Fedora GNOME or other alternatives.

• Life Fedy, PostInstallerF is yet another tool that permits the users to easily install multimedia codecs, enable third party repos, install Adobe Flash, Java, proprietary GPU drivers, with a few clicks only.

• Being Fedora what we could define “a bleeding edge distro”, whenever we perform Exploratory Testing, we certainly have the opportunity to raise the quality of the shipped packages. I’d also say that this process must not substitute automated/scripted testing, which is a fundamental aspect of software development. Modern approaches like Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development can assure that the key parts of the application works as intended. Moreover, the Test Cases designed by Fedora QA are handy procedures that check whether the release criterion are met or not and assure that the main features aren’t affected by severe bugs. Indeed, Exploratory Testing is always helpful in order to highlight surprises which aren’t currently covered by common situations and recommended steps.

• This is the updated color palette that I’m using for creating mockups for Askbot. This color palette comply with the Fedora color palette given here.

• According to the feedback received from the mentors, I updated the mockups that I have created for Askbot using colors used in the Fedora color palette and also giving more focus on the grid system. I have included some little user experience improvements also in these mockups and we are planning to discuss further on user experience of Askbot as well.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu phone has disappeared from the official store, and there is no information as of yet why that has happened.

• Developer Marcos Costales had the great pleasure of unveiling what it appears to be the first ever turn-by-turn GPS navigation app for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system from Canonical, which powers the so-called Ubuntu phones.

• The Ubuntu Software Center is a great piece of technology that has lived its life and needs to either go away or go through a major transformation. The new Snappy packages that will be soon used in the Ubuntu desktop would be a great opportunity.

• Martin Pitt, a renown Ubuntu developer, who apparently is in charge of the systemd maintenance/development for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, posted a message on the Ubuntu mailing list asking for assistance in maintaining systemd in Ubuntu.

• So I sent emails to the Ubuntu Community Council, Jonathan Riddell, and the Kubuntu Council, asking all of them the same four questions. I’m going to include them below – in their entirety – with as little comment from me as possible.

• Zoltán Balogh posted recently some information regarding the latest changes implemented in the Ubuntu SDK (Software Developer Kit), which is used for developing applications for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

• As you may already know, Canonical has worked a lot at Ubuntu Touch lately and the fourth update (OTA 4) is scheduled for release next week, the update being available only on the Bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition.

• The indicators icons have been all made monochromatic, the Address Book has received support for importing SIM contacts, a new settings panel and improved the first improved first time user experience for contact sync/import, the Messaging app has received support for group chat, the News scope has received an improved layout, the Today, Nearby and News scopes got support for keywords and scope tagging has been implemented.

Flavours and Variants

• The Ubuntu MATE developers are looking for community feedback regarding the creation of a new alternative image that would pack a minimum amount of packages and that would fit on a single CD.

Devices/Embedded

• Read our detailed post describing this year’s survey, and then fill out our short 2-minute survey. Pick your favorite three SBCs from this list or write-in your own alternatives, answer a few questions about what you’re looking for in a hacker board, and then enter the drawing for the chance to win one of 20 free SBCs.

Phones

Android

• The Kodi media center finally has a new official Android remote name Kore that has been developed by a member of the community.

• We all expected Android M to be announced at I/O today. The new OS won’t launch officially until Q3 but it has got some nice features we know of which we can look forward too.

• Google on Thursday unveiled Android M, a new version of Android that focuses on improving overall user experience. It also packs quite a few interesting new features, including hidden functionality that Google didn’t thoroughly explain.

• Google’s Android 5.1.1 update has been official since April but it only recently started picking up steam with releases for the Nexus 6, Nexus 5, and Nexus 4. With those updates in mind, we take a look at a few things we learned about Google’s Android 5.1.1 release over the course of the last month.

• The folders in Google’s stock Google Now Launcher are currently restricted to just 16 entries (four rows of four). That’s going to change very soon. The version of GNL that ships with the Android M preview has folders that automatically paginate when you add more than 16 apps. How many pages can you have? I’m not sure as I have yet to hit the limit.

• Even though Google started the whole mobile payment thing years ago with Google Wallet, it never really took off with the masses. Google’s newly announced Android Pay, however, might. Just like Google Wallet, Android Pay lets you simply tap your phone on an NFC terminal to make a purchase, but with a little less hassle — there’s no need to enter in a PIN to enable payments. In addition, Google is also allowing Android Pay to be integrated in apps like Lyft, Grubhub and Wish, so users can easily use that to pay for things. I just used Android Pay here at Google I/O, and I can say this: If it’s as easy to use in real life, then I suspect mobile payments are about to be a lot more ubiquitous.

• This was the most Android-centric I/O in recent memory.

• Chances are that if you’re in the recovery interface of your phone, it’s because you broke something, need to force an update, and you’re just fiddling with things. The stock recovery doesn’t have a ton of options, which is why alternatives like ClockworkMod and TWRP exist. Still, the stock recovery in Android M is a little more capable than before.

• An Android foundation could help return Nintendo to relevance

• The only way for Computex, Asia’s foremost tech exhibition, to get going is with a deluge of announcements from local powerhouse Asus, and this year’s show is no different. One of the big attention grabbers from Asus today is the ZenWatch 2, its second Android Wear smartwatch.

• When you stop and think about it, the word “smartphone” is starting to sound a little stale.

• Sure, these pocket-size gadgets we tote around are capable of making calls — but for most of us, that’s become a secondary feature compared to the range of data-centric functions the devices enable. In reality, we’re carrying tiny, capable computers that also happen to work as phones.

• ASUS brought in a big bag of gadgets to present at Computex 2015 in Taipei, and the latest composites of circuitry, metal, glass, and black magic to emerge from it are named the ZenPad 8 & ZenPad S 8. As made apparent by their names, this is a duo of tablets that we’re talking about, and the slates are made special by the fact that they are the first to carry the Zen brand. Oh, and they also have some interesting Intel hardware inside!

Free Software/Open Source

• What is the value of an open source platform? Would someone ever pay for it outright? Indeed, how does someone use an open source platform? Let’s start with the oldest and most significant of open source platforms, Linux. For the longest time, Linux was dismissed as a non-viable data center technology for “enterprise-grade” or “business critical” operations because it had no support model, no applications that ran on it and no obvious way to make money from it. How, then, did Linux become the engine that fueled the growth of the world’s open source ecosystem, an ecosystem that could be valued in the trillions of dollars, when calculating the percentage of the world’s economy that relies on open source systems? Was it just a bunch of hippies sharing the software and singing about it, or were there clear business reasons paving the way to its eventual victory?

• The state of affairs of enterprise IT is changing quickly. Open source will become a much higher percentage of every IT organization’s environment, given its advantages in terms of cost, control, and innovation. Likewise, open source skills will soon become a critical requirement, both for using open source wisely, but also in attracting the kind of talent necessary to compete in a Third Platform world.

• The takeover of the SourceForge account for the Windows version of the open-source GIMP image editing tool reported by Ars last week is hardly the first case of the once-pioneering software repository attempting to cash in on open-source projects that have gone inactive or have actually attempted to shut down their SourceForge accounts. Over the past few years, SourceForge (launched by VA Linux Systems in 1999 and now owned by the tech job site company previously known as Dice) has made it a business practice to turn abandoned or inactive projects into platforms for distribution of “bundle-ware” installers.

• Despite promises to avoid deceptive advertisements that trick site visitors into downloading unwanted software and malware onto their computers, these malicious ads are legion on projects that have been taken over by SourceForge’s anonymous editorial staff. SourceForge’s search engine ranking for these projects often makes the site the first link provided to people seeking downloads for code on Google and Bing search results.

• And because of SourceForge’s policies, it’s nearly impossible for open-source projects to get their code removed from the site. SourceForge is, in essence, the Hotel California of code repositories: you can check your project out any time you want, but you can never leave.

• In an open organization, measuring performance for particular roles like community managers may not be straightforward, especially when comparing those roles to others with more defined success metrics, goals, and outcomes. In my experience over the past six years, I’ve worked closely with my manager to make sure that we are in sync with my objectives and what I need to do in order to maximize my impact in my role as a community manager.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• After three Beta releases, the final version of the Mozilla Firefox 38.0.5 web browser has arrived today for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

SaaS/Big Data

• Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

• As a few people have noticed, I’m a bit of an internet control freak: In an age of central “cloud based” services, I run pretty much my own everything (blog, mail server, DNS, OpenID, web page etc.). That doesn’t make me anti-cloud; I just believe in federation instead of centralisation. In particular, I believe in owning my own content and obeying my own rules rather than those of $BIGCLOUDPROVIDER.

Databases

Funding/GSoC

• It seems a bit late for introduction so I’ll mainly talk about what my project is about for google summer of code, 2015 and what I’ve done so far. Lasse Schuirmann is my mentor for this project who has been very supportive.

Public Services/Government

• As a technology user and enthusiast, I believe in the critical role of open-source software to create the applications and infrastructure necessary to support government-funded technology projects. There is an accelerating interest in and use of open-source software worldwide. Local governments are changing. Forward-thinking municipalities are embracing technology to make countries and cities better for everyone. Innovative government staff are sharing resources, best practices, and collaborating on common problems. Jamaica needs to provide a broad range of resources, programmes and services to support and advance civic innovation.

• As open-source software becomes the leading information technology day by day, and there are open-source alternatives to most of the commercial software, Jamaica must join this technological revolution, as the national pledge does state, “…so that Jamaica may play her part in the advancement of the whole human race”.

• Open-source software is computer software with its source code made available with a licence in which the copyright holder supplies the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any reason or function. Open-source software is oftentimes developed in a public, collaborative manner. It is the most striking example of open-source development and often compared to (technically defined) user-generated content or (legally defined) open-content movements.

Licensing

• Historically, Conservancy has published extensive materials about enforcement of the GPL, including blog posts, announcements regarding compliance actions, many sections appearing in the definitive Copyleft Guide (a joint initiative with the Free Software Foundation). After Conservancy’s recent announcement of its funding of Christoph Hellwig’s lawsuit against VMware, Conservancy has sought to answer as many questions as possible about GPL enforcement.

• In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with François Marier, a free software developer from New Zealand. He is the creator and lead developer of Libravatar. In addition to his passion for decentralization, he contributes to the Debian project and volunteers on the FSF licensing team.

• Libravatar is a free network service providing profile photos for a number of Web sites, including bugs.debian.org and git.kernel.org. Its flexible architecture allows end users to host their own images and allows Web sites to use Gravatar as a fallback when necessary. It is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, or end user can opt for any later version (GNU AGPLv3+).

Openness/Sharing

• You may not have noticed, but people often become attached to their favorite technology. This could be a mobile phone, a programming language, or a text editor. When you work on someone else’s project, you generally have to go with whatever the prevailing tools and languages are, but when it’s your own project, you get to choose the toys. Documentation requires technology, too, but most people have less of a pre-set opinion about documentation tooling than they do about web frameworks and version control systems. So how is a project to choose?

Open Data

• Half a world away, University of Washington civil and envi­ron­men­tal engi­neer­ing stu­dents trace the out­lines of roads, paths and build­ings in Nepal from their lap­tops.

• Using open data soft­ware Open­StreetMap, the students in assistant professor Jes­sica Kamin­sky’s Civil Engi­neer­ing in Devel­op­ing Com­mu­ni­ties class joined an online com­mu­nity effort to turn satel­lite imagery of Nepal into maps and aid the earth­quake relief effort. These dig­i­tized maps provide emer­gency respon­ders and relief coordinators responding to the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershocks in Nepal with crit­i­cal data to guide teams deployed on the ground.

• Bulgaria has just published the first datasets on its open data portal. Currently, about 36 datasets from 26 public agencies have been made available online. The organisations involved were summoned to do so by the Council of Ministers. The Council even has a dedicated team to overcome resistance at the agencies and help them to extract and cleanse the data from the databases. The ambition is to publish another 100 datasets before the end of this year.

Standards/Consortia

• The United Kingdom has revised its Digital Service Standard, which describes the components for building eGovernment services. The update came into effect on 1 June, and is to be used for new and redesigned external-facing services.

Leftovers

• But Mr Hunt has faced a backlash this morning from doctors and nurses who say that government cuts are responsible for creating a heightened demand for agency workers.

Security

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Jeb Bush is the highest profile speaker at a secretive three-day retreat in Bristol, Virginia, hosted by the CEOs of six coal companies, according to materials for the invitation-only event obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and shared with the Guardian.

• The $7,500-a-person exclusive golf and fly-fishing retreat will give top coal CEOs – and reliable Republican donors – access to the 2016 presidential hopeful

Privacy

• Adding encryption to the channel between you and Facebook also does very little to protect you from government surveillance. While state actors, and other people tapping your line, might not be able to read the contents of the messages, they have full access to the subject line and the metadata (who sent the message, who received it, when, and so forth). If the US government is in any way interested in what you’re doing on the site, they only need to ask. The same goes for any other government with which, in order to be allowed to operate, Facebook has cut a deal to rat out its users, such as China.

Civil Rights

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