● 06.10.15

● Links 10/6/2015: New Krita/Calligra and Clonezilla

Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux really just amounts to the Kernel. The average Linux distribution has more GNU in it than Linux. GNU generally refers to a collection of tools and libraries shipped along with the Linux kernel such as the GNU CoreUtils, C compiler, BASH etc.

• Logically speaking if I were to write an article stating that there is a new release of a Linux distribution available I should say the GNU/Linux distribution because otherwise I am giving all the credit to the Linux kernel and no credit to GNU.

Desktop

• There you have it… encryption made simple, even within the Linux platform. Some of these tools can also go well beyond user-friendliness and into the land of very powerful. But if you’re looking for an app that offers the security of encryption, and does so with a nod to user-friendliness, these five apps will get you started.

• Do you have a favorite Linux encryption tool that didn’t make this list? Share your recommendations with fellow TechRepublic members.

Server

• Linux is hot right now. Everybody is looking for Linux talent. Recruiters are knocking down the doors of anybody with Linux experience, and there are tens of thousands of jobs waiting to be filled. But what if you want to take advantage of this trend and you’re new to Linux? How do you get started?

• Docker is a container host, a multitude of corrections tell us, and not an operating system. But the “container host” took another huge step towards looking like an operating system, as Docker Inc. officially launched this week the first in what appear to be several ecosystem technology partner programs, this one geared toward certifying monitoring systems.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• It turns out that the XWayland server currently starts up in a non-authenticating mode, thus any client with access to the server UNIX socket could connect to the server and use it. However, there’s no Wayland compositors out there known to start XWayland with open TCP access, so at least remote exploits aren’t expected. But this does mean that locally, untrusted users could capture input meant from other X11 clients, etc.

Benchmarks

• Two weeks ago AMD launched the A10-7870K “Godavari” APU. As there haven’t been too many independent benchmarks of the A10-7870K yet, this week I picked up the new high-end APU and have been running a plethora of performance tests under Ubuntu Linux. Here’s the first batch of the AMD A10-7870K Linux tests.

Applications

• Cutegram, the best Telegram client for GNU/Linux operating systems, was updated on June 9 to version 2.4.0, an important release that adds new features and fixes multiple bugs.

• A quick and elegant method to launch applications, manage windows, manage current session, control multimedia application, ..etc using a circular pies.

• Version 2.7 of the FFmpeg open-source multimedia project was tagged today.

• FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video, and its developers have just released a new major update for it, version 2.7, which is now ready for download.

• A new version of the popular darktable open-source RAW image editor software for Linux and Mac OS X operating systems was made available on June 9, and it is an important release that adds many improvements and support for new cameras.

• I am a software developer by profession and for years have been developing and maintaining my open source Linux project, RapidDisk.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Bundle Stars, a popular game bundle website, has begun the Triple The Fun week which brings cheap triple packs of Steam games every day until Friday.

• Humble Indie Bundle: All-Stars is a new collection of games from Humble Bundle and all the titles included have Linux support, which is always a nice touch.

• Umbra is a new gorgeous hack’n’slash action RPG developed by a studio called SolarFall Games, and it will be available for the Linux platform. The developers have been kind enough to answer a few questions and give the gaming community more details about this upcoming triple-A title.

• Epic Games just announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.8 with “189 great changes” for game developers leveraging this AAA game engine.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Lydia Pintscher, our very own KDE e.V. Board President and a gem of a person; will be giving the Community Keynote Talk at Akademy 2015, in A Coruña, Spain. This is just a tiny peak into her brain for all that is in store for you in her talk.

• The Calligra 2.9.5 open-source office suite for KDE desktop environments has been released earlier, as reported by Softpedia. The Krita digital painting software has been updated as part of the new Calligra release, and it is has a massive changelog.

• Making some rounds on the Internet today is CopperSpice, a fork of Qt 4.8 from two years ago that’s starting to take shape as a nice C++ GUI library for developers.

• The Kickstarter was a success, but that didn’t keep us from adding new features and fixing bugs! We made quite a bit of progress including adding pass-through mode to group layers, allowing inherit alpha to be used on all layer types, better PSD support, and adding an on-canvas preview of the color being picked. We even added a new brush preset history docker! You can see the full release notes below.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Advanced Gtk+ Sequencer is intended to use for music composition. It features a piano roll, as well a synth, matrix editor, drum machine, soundfont2 player, mixer and an output panels designed to be highly configurable. You may add effects to its effect chain and add or remove audio channels/pads. You may set up a fully functional network of engines, thus there is a link editor for linking audio lines.

• I decided to spend some time today to play with GtkAssistant, more precisely, I tried to build a mock installation wizard mimicking Boxes’ one in order to test how I could adapt its behaviour to make it GtkAssistant ready.

Distributions

New Releases

• A few days ago Clonezilla, the popular Linux distribution with a focus on disk imaging and cloning, released version 2.4.2-10, and this release is a big one.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) launches on a not-to-frequent basis, RHEL 7 launched last year, three years on from RHEL 6. To prevent applications becoming to out-of-date the Red Hat Software Collections are released which contain newer web development tools, dynamic languages and databases.

Fedora

• The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee met today to discuss features proposed for Fedora 23.

• Approved at today’s FESCo meeting was the system firmware updates item along with having a default local DNS resolver.

Debian Family

• Zyne is a modular synthetizer written in Python. Anyone can create and extend its modules using the Pyo library. Zyne’s GUI is coded using WXPython and will look nicely in GNU/Linux, Mac and Windows systems. It’s written by the same author of Pyo, and together with Cecilia and Soundgrain is part of an amazing set of libre tools for sound synthesis and electronic music composition.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical employee Łukasz Zemczak revealed recently the fact that the next OTA (Over the Air) software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used in Ubuntu phones should arrive at the beginning or in mid July 2015.

• System76 is a hardware company well known for producing unique laptops powered by the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, and it has just unveiled a new product called Serval WS.

• Canonical has a Raspberry Pi 2 image based on Ubuntu Snappy Core, but it’s still in the early stages of development. The truth is that it still needs a lot of work, and the developers are looking for people who are willing to test it.

• It’s easy to forget that Ubuntu Touch is actually a Linux-based phone, but that’s perfectly true. That’s why it’s possible to connect a USB keyboard to it and use it with very few modifications.

• Canonical has published in a new security notice details about a strongSwan vulnerability that has been found and corrected in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems.

• Canonical’s convergence concept might seem alien at first sight, but the developers are homing in on what they actually want to achieve and they have recently defined what they are looking for and what their final aim is.

• The latest Apple WWDC conference announced a number of new releases in the Apple ecosystem, but one of the features, in particular, seems take a page out of Ubuntu’s handbook. It’s not a copied feature per say, but it looks awfully familiar.

• Following the release of the BQ Aquaris E4.5 earlier this year, BQ have started selling the Aquaris E5. The device will not ship until June 21 and shipments will only be made to the European Union, Norway and Switzerland. On the plus side however it comes in at a relatively cheap €199.90/£146.83/$224.70.

Flavours and Variants

• The MATE desktop environment is getting a major update, and it will land soon in repositories everywhere. We take a closer at what’s new with MATE 1.10 to see what the features to be implemented are.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• There’s an almost endless number of Android phones to choose from on the market today. But only a handful make the grade, as far as we’re concerned.

• These are our picks for the top Androids currently available in the United States. Any one would be a perfect choice for beginners or Android power users.

• Developing for Android Wear can be a lot of fun, but there are some things you need to know before you get started. Android Wear is still in its infancy stages, although with updates like 5.1.1 it is quickly maturing.

• One of Android M’s cool new features is meant to improve the overall user experience concerns battery life. Announced on stage last week during the opening keynote of Google I/O 2015, Doze will put apps in a deep sleep status and will supposedly have a significant impact on battery life. Now, a first round of early testing shows that the feature already works, even though Android M is only available in an early beta version of Google’s latest mobile software.

• The details are in on Apple’s next version of its iOS mobile operating. Apple unveiled iOS 9 at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and that appears to be true for Apple’s so-called “new features,” many of which have been available on Android for years.

• Android M is coming to a smartphone or tablet near you so here are the 10 best new features.

• You know the drill: every time Apple or Google announce major new updates for their operating systems, some people, including diehard fans of each platform, are quick to point out that some of the new features have been copied from the other side. Such is the case with iOS 9, which Apple just unveiled. iPhone fans will praise some of these new iOS 9 features as being unique and useful, but Android fans will still accuse Apple of having shamelessly copied them.

• Apple is planning a massive global roll-out of its new streaming service, Apple Music. One report claims the Cupertino company is hoping to bag 100 million users for the app.

• With iOS 9 Apple is making a direct play for Android users with an app to help them migrate their data and apps to the iPhone.

• Android 5.1 Lollipop is at long last headed the Motorola Droid Turbo’s way. The Verizon-exclusive handset will make a big leap from Android KitKat 4.4 to the latest build of Google’s operating system, officially ending the users’ wait.

• Currently, this is the set-top box that has it all. If you need something like this in your life, NVIDIA Shield is the best money can buy right now. The gaming experience is fluid and the gamepad, while bulky, feels comparable to an Xbox or PlaySation controller. Like I said, the NVIDIA Shield is the only set-top box that puts gaming first, which is pretty obvious as it comes with a gamepad.

• Huawei is delaying the release of the Huawei Watch in China thanks to issues that the timepiece is having with the Android Wear operating system. Because Android Wear is not as open as Android, Huawei is forced to replace Google Services with its own services in order for the timepiece to work in the country. Introduced this past March at MWC, pre-orders for the device began in several markets late last month, including the U.S. Ironically, China is not among the countries that will receive the device this summer.

• Way back in February the LG G3 Android Lollipop update finally started rolling out in the United States on multiple carriers, following a release in other regions around the globe. The T-Mobile LG G3 Android 5.0 update started in April but was quickly delayed due to some problems and bugs, and today we’re happy to announce a new LG G3 update has been released.

• It’s been a year since Android Auto was announced, and it’s only now starting to hit the market. You can buy a handful of cars with support for Auto (with a software update), and more vehicles are on the way. There are also some aftermarket head units that can smarten up your dumb old car. Now that it’s finally reaching consumer availability, we can see how Google’s car infotainment platform works.

• Remember when Steve Jobs called Android a “stolen product?” How about the lawsuits Apple filed against Samsung over rounded corners on its phones or Microsoft over the concept of a graphical interface? The Cupertino company has a long history of striking out at competitors who have similar features in their products, even if the concepts involved are obvious or were pioneered by someone other than Apple.

• As Hyundai announces the first production car to sport Android Auto, Jack Wallen ponders the importance of this evolution in mobility.

• Sharp’s first 4K televisions running Android TV are now hitting stores. Five sets, ranging from a 60-inch set to 80-inch sets, are now “shipping into the marketplace,” Sharp said this morning. That makes Sharp among the first few supporters of Google’s latest smart TV platform — easily its best attempt yet. Sony put sets running Android TV on sale earlier this spring, and Philips is supposed to bring Android TV to its 2015 lineup as well.

Free Software/Open Source

• Blockstream has announced it will release an open source codebase and testing environment for its signature sidechains project.

• Huawei, this week announced that it has become the first global ICT vendor to obtain certification by Databricks for distribution of the Apache Spark open source big data processing framework. Databricks, a company founded by the creators of Spark, has developed the “Certified Spark Distribution” program to highlight and recognize third party vendors distributing Spark. Leveraging the high-performance big data computing architecture and the complete ecosystem of Spark, the Huawei-Spark platform is designed to help customers realize the full potential of data assets to drive agile operation and business innovation.

• To help users extract insights from data lakes,Teradata has made a multi-year commitment to contribute to Presto’s open source development. Based on a three-part roadmap, Teradata’s says its contributions will be 100% open source under the Apache license and will advance Presto’s code base, scalability, iterative querying, and ability to query multiple data repositories.

• Priyanka Nag is a technical writer for Red Hat and Mozilla Rep from India. Priyanka has been contributing to open source projects for the past four years. She started by editing Wikipedia pages, and then was introduced to Mozilla during an event at her college. She says that Mozilla was love at first sight, and soon after she became a Mozillian, she was hooked on the project. Now Priyanka is also a regular speaker at community events in India. I recently caught up with Priyanka to learn more about her work in the Mozilla Community and her thoughts on the importance of the open web in India.

• Open source software is not just meant for still-struggling start-ups that can’t afford to pay the licensing fees for proprietary software, and budget-conscious, modest small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) hoping to cut down on IT costs. This was proven in late September when several major companies – running the gamut from technology, right through to retail and media – came together to form the TODO project.

• Data visualization is the mechanism of taking tabular or spatial data and conveying it in a human-friendly and visual way. There are several open source tools that can help you create useful, informative graphs. In this post we will take a look at eight open source, data visualization tools.

• If you’re reading the news lately, you might know that the SourceForge project hosting website has been accused of hijacking open-source software that have been abandoned by their maintainers or did not have some activity for an extended period of time.

• For years, Linux and free software were perceived as threatened by cloud computing, the online storage of data. However, over the last few years, something ironic happened — free software became a major player in cloud computing.

Events

• Although the Year of the Linux Desktop has yet to arrive, a surprising number of Linux users nevertheless need graphics support. This is because there have been a number of years of the Linux smartphone, the Linux television, the Linux digital sign/display/billboard, the Linux automobile, and more. This microconference will cover a number of topics including atomic modesetting in KMS, buffer allocation, verified-secure graphics pipelines, fencing and synchronisation, Wayland, and more.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Pocket is a service for managing a reading list of online articles (it allows you to save stories, videos, and websites to check out later). Pocket is already offered as a Firefox add-on, and although Mozilla was developing a homegrown Reading List feature for the browser, the company decided to simply integrate Pocket directly into Firefox.

SaaS/Big Data

• Cisco and IBM are doubling down on OpenStack, hoping “the result lets them develop a solution that will scale. Neither company is yet willing to abandon OpenStack, and both feel there’s still a solution in it someplace,” said tech analyst Rob Enderle. By acquiring Piston Cloud Computing and Blue Box Cloud, they “may correct some of the problems with OpenStack, which should improve penetration.”

Business

Semi-Open Source

Funding

• Container technology remains red hot and VC money is flowing toward it. Rancher Labs, a startup developing Docker infrastructure software, has announced $10 million in Series A funding from Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners. “With the rapid adoption of container technology, the company’s open source software has grown in popularity by allowing organizations to run containers in production, across any cloud,” Rancher Labs’ leaders have stated.

Public Services/Government

• Public administrations that switch to open source regain financial scalability, says Jan-Taeke Schuilenga, IT architect at DUO, the Dutch government agency managing the financing of the country’s educational institutions. “We had reached the limit of proprietary licence possibilities. Switching to open source gave us freedom of choice.”

Openness/Sharing

• What do the most successful producer/directors in the history of cinema do in their spare time? If you’re James Cameron, apparently you design open source solar arrays.

Open Data

• The UK government must open up and highlight the power of more basic data sets to improve patient care in the NHS and save hundreds of millions of pounds a year, Nigel Shadbolt, chairman of the Open Data Institute (ODI) has urged.

Standards/Consortia

• Once upon a time, standards were standards and open source software was open source software (OSS), and the only thing people worried about was whether the copyright and patent rules relating to the standards would prevent them from being implemented in OSS. Actually, that was complicated enough, but it seems simple in comparison now that OSS is being included in the standards themselves. Now what?

• If this sounds unusual and exotic, it isn’t. In fact, code has been creeping into standards for years, often without the keepers of the intellectual property rights (IPR) Policies governing the standards even being aware of it.

Leftovers

Security

• When security researcher Billy Rios reported earlier this year that he’d found vulnerabilities in a popular drug infusion pump that would allow a hacker to raise the dosage limit on medication delivered to patients, there was little cause for concern.

• Canonical has released some details in a security notice about quite a few QEMU vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, operating systems.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Finance

• One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single, state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor. This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including dissolving the city itself—all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

• Let’s say that tomorrow you are elected Secret Ruler of the USA, a position that gives you total power over the government, economy, and the culture at large — everything that hippies refer to as “the system.” Now, your first job is to not get beheaded by rioting peasants, which means your first job is really to maintain “stability” (i.e., “keeping things mostly the way they are”).

• Immediately you’ll find that you’re facing a never-ending stream of protests from disgruntled groups who say they’re being treated unfairly or otherwise getting left out — this group over here is upset that somebody got abused by the police; this other bunch is demanding better wages or something. How do you handle it? Sure, you could crush their movements with an iron fist, using violence to kill, intimidate or arrest their most vocal members. But that can backfire, often turning them into martyrs and proving them right in the process — you’ve seen Star Wars; somebody always finds the exhaust port.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Intrepid reporter Brendan Keefe, of NBC Channel 11 Atlanta, went behind the scenes at ALEC’s spring meeting in Savannah, Georgia and caught a lobbyist and a legislator on tape explaining how corporations bankroll lawmakers’ resort trips through ALEC. The report quickly went viral. See how ALEC responded to the investigation in this amusing new video from 11 Alive.

• So advertisers will come to Courageous because CNN‘s “trustworthiness” and unwillingness to “blur the lines” will be transfered by viewers to advertising content that is “similar” to CNN‘s news but “clearly label[ed] and differentiat[ed].” This is a business strategy, of course, that only works if the similarity outweighs the differentiation.

Censorship

• As you may have heard, DARPA, the wonderful government agency folks who helped bring us the precursors to the internet and self-driving cars, held a giant robotics competition this weekend, known as the DARPA Robotic Challenge, or DRC. It was full of amazing robots — though everyone seems focused on the ones that fell over, despite the amazing advancements in robotics that were on display.

Privacy

• Edward Snowden’s leaks exposed a federal government unable to protect its most sensitive secrets.

• The White House now requires all publicly accessible federal websites and services to use a secure HTTPS connection.

• Government agencies have until Dec. 31, 2016 to comply with the new HTTPS-Only Standard directive.

• Unencrypted HTTP connections “create a vulnerability and expose potentially sensitive information about users,” U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott said in this week’s announcement. That includes data like browser identity, website content, search terms, and other user-submitted details.

• The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

• The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

• The Surveillance Bill was adopted today by the French Senate with 251 votes for, 68 against and 26 abstentions. This bill was fast tracked and discussed under the pressure of a government wielding the argument of an extreme terrorist risk to impose massive spying of the French population with expansive purposes. It will put France under a surveillance all at once diffuse, intrusive, indiscriminate and without effective control. La Quadrature du Net bitterly regrets the blindness of the French Parliamentarians and calls on citizens not to give up on their liberties.

Civil Rights

• The bulk of recent incidents concerning the anti-Israel boycott, which are mainly symbolic for now, could have served as a warning sign. But a mixture of nationalistic and false statements is blinding the Israeli public and preventing a real discussion of the issue. Here are a few examples.

• A British woman arrested in Malaysia for posing naked on top of a sacred mountain has been named as Eleanor Hawkins.

• The 24-year-old Southampton University graduate from Derby was detained on Tuesday at Tawau airport, as she was flying out from the island of Borneo to the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

• Despite numerous representations and an Early Day Motion signed by the large majority of Scotland’s MPs, Theresa May has ordered that Majid Ali, a Glasgow City College student, be deported back to almost certain torture and probable death in Pakistan in just twenty minutes from now. I attended the demonstration on his behalf yesterday at the Scottish Office.

• Majid is a member of the much persecuted Baloch minority. Two of his immediate family have been “disappeared” by the Pakistani military since his asylum application was submitted. There is no doubt that given the numerous MP’s who have raised his case, and the well-supported early day motion, civil servants will have put the decision to May personally. She was however not even prepared to grant a delay for a look at the evidence. May is very likely not merely pandering to the racist UKIP voting electorate – she is on the far right of politics herself. The callous sacrifice of Majid Ali is proof, if any more were needed, that this Conservative administration is nothing to do with Cameron’s purported “compassionate conservatism.” They are the nasty party indeed.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The European Commission attacks Net Neutrality again, by introducing a “compromise document” that refuses to enshrine a definition of this crucial principle into the law. A strong coalition including the EU Council, the European Commission and a handful of MEPs is working against the general interest by including loopholes that will be used by the telecom lobby to circumvent the proposed protections against discrimination, thereby undermining fundamental rights and innovation.

• Gaffe-prone Gunther H-dot, Europe’s digital chief, has waded into the net neutrality debate once again, but has vowed to sort everything out in a meeting with national ministers next Friday.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, has admitted that EU copyright law is “pushing people to steal,” because they seek out illegal copies of works that are not available to them legally because of the widespread use of geoblocking in Europe.

• Academic publishing company Elsevier has filed a complaint at a New York District Court, hoping to shut down the Library Genesis project and the SciHub.org search engine. The sites, which are particularly popular in developing nations where access to academic works is relatively expensive, are accused of pirating millions of scientific articles.

• Kim Dotcom’s dream of a people-powered, censorship-resistant Internet will rely on the goodwill of supporters to get off the ground. In an announcement this morning, the entrepreneur confirmed that his MegaNet project will seek equity via a crowd-funding campaign set to launch on the January 2016 anniversary of the raid on Megaupload.

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