● 07.07.15

● Links 7/7/2015: Lenovo ThinkPad With GNU/Linux, More Containers Hype

Posted in News Roundup at 5:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When Rick migrated us over to Linux, I had no idea what Linux was or why it would be any better than the Windows systems we had been using. I had seriously considered changing the whole operation to Macs, until the sticker shock set in. The fact that Rick assured me the hack would have not occurred on Linux was surely one of the reasons I went along. With some online guidance from Rick, I installed Linux on my personal/work computer at home under a dual boot. Prior to that, I had been looking at a lot of screen shots of Linux systems. A lot of them.

• I got out of the Army mid-2003 and started my IT career. I worked my way through the ranks from help desk to Admin, and later to Engineer and Architect. As my career progressed, I took positions as a Linux Engineer for companies like Dell and Sprint. I maintained Linux infrastructures that processed life-saving information for a private company in conjunction with the National Weather Service headquarters.

• I also mentioned that it was inconvenient to use port 443 for SSH, because it meant I couldn’t host secure Web sites on that server. Fred graciously pointed me to sslh, which is an awesome little program that multiplexes (or maybe de-multiplexes?) network traffic based on the type of traffic it sees. In simple terms, it means that sslh will listen for incoming connections on a port like 443, and if it’s a request for a Web page, it will send the request to Apache. If it’s an SSH request, it sends it to the SSH dæmon. It also has support for OpenVPN traffic, XMPP traffic and tinc.

Desktop

• Over the years, I’ve heard both Windows users and Linux enthusiasts make the claim that professional media production on Linux is impossible. While there may be some workflows so over-engineered that legacy software is a must, I firmly believe that, with effort, using Linux for media production is doable.

• Citrix has made good on its April promise to deliver virtual Linux desktops, today announcing it’s ready to roll out penguin-powered pretend PCs.

• The company snuck the penguin-powered desktops into Feature Pack 2 for XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6. For now, Citrix says says you can choose from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Workstation and Server, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server 11 Service Pack 3, the two distros the company says its customers have asked for the most.

• Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has announced that Lenovo will start shipping Ubuntu preloaded devices starting with ThinkPad L450 laptop series this month. The laptops will be on sale at selected commercial resellers and distributors at Rs 40,000.

Server

• Linux container technology is the latest computing trend sweeping the computing world. A lot of financial and technical investors, Linux software programmers, and customers are betting that containers will change the way businesses manage their computer systems—from deployment to maintenance. Container technology has become its own ecosystem with no less than 60 companies supporting some aspect of the technology. But what exactly are Linux containers, and how can they help you?

• The industry is excited about containers in application development, and it will yield significant value in the application-centric cloud

• IBM has introduced enterprise-class containers to make it easier for clients to deliver production applications across their hybrid environments.

• The survey, commissioned by Red Hat and conducted by TechValidate, assessed enterprise adoption plans for application containers. The survey sought responses from more than 383 global IT decision makers and professionals from April 28 to May 5. The organizations polled ranged from Fortune 500 companies to state and local governments.

Kernel Space

• If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window will close this afternoon followed by the immediate release of the Linux 4.2-rc1 test version. With all major pull requests having already been submitted for Linux 4.2, here’s an overview of the exciting new features and changed functionality to look forward to with this kernel version to officially debut later this summer!

• Linus Torvalds has revealed that the first Release Candidate for Linux kernel 4.2 has arrived and that it’s one of the biggest ever to land. It’s big because it comes with AMD GPU register description headers, among other things.

• As you may know, Kernel 3.19 has reached EOL (end of life), but because it is used by default on Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, the development has been adopted by Canonical.

• The annual Kernel Summit for 2015 will be held October 26th through the 28th in Seoul, South Korea, overlapping with the Korea Linux Forum, which will be on October 26th.

• A few more input driver updates were mailed in this morning for the Linux 4.2 kernel. This second input update for this next kernel version has better Xbox Wireless Controller support thanks to a patch from Valve.

Graphics Stack

• Rob Clark has shared a new blog post today about “happy (gpu) independence day” with his work on the open-source Freedreno driver for freeing Qualcomm Linux users of the Adreno binary blob.

Benchmarks

• Now that I seem to have found a workaround for my Core i7 5775C Broadwell Linux issue that resulted in very frequent kernel panics, it’s off to the benchmark races. Here are some preliminary Linux benchmark figures for this first socketed Intel Broadwell LGA-1150 desktop CPU with Iris 6200 graphics.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Torque 3D 3.7 was released last week as the new version of this advanced game engine that’s been open-source for the past three years.

• Torque 3D 3.7 offers large improvements for Linux and OpenGL rendering support. The Linux client support for this game engine should now be in place in full while some bugs are still being worked out.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• For those running KDE on a systemd-based Linux system, the KDE Control Module for controlling this init system and its options has been updated.

• Systemd-kcm 1.2.0 was released four days ago. Systemd-kcm is a KDE control module for graphically managing systemd and related services such as logind.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME developers are working to improve the functionality and looks of some of the core apps in the stack, and it looks like Photos is just one of them. Allan Day has explained some of the changes that are going to be made to Photos, and they are quite impressive.

Distributions

Reviews

• Alpine Linux has become one of the most frequently requested distributions on my list of projects to review. Alpine is an independent distribution which, as the project’s front page tells us, is “a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.” The project’s About page goes into more detail: “Alpine Linux is a very simple distribution that will try to stay out of your way. It uses its own package manager, called apk, the OpenRC init system, script driven set-ups and that’s it! This provides you with a simple, crystal-clear Linux environment without all the noise. You can then add on top of that just the packages you need for your project, so whether it’s building a home PVR, or an iSCSI storage controller, a wafer-thin mail server container, or a rock-solid embedded switch, nothing else will get in the way.”

New Releases

• 4MLinux, a mini Linux distribution that is focused on the 4Ms of computing, Maintenance (system rescue Live CD), Multimedia (e.g., playing video DVDs), Miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and Mystery (Linux games), has been upgraded to version 13 and is now ready for download.

• The Solus project is moving very fast, and its developers have managed to push another release out the door, this time with a lot of fixes that have been spotted and repaired in a very short amount of time.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• The openSUSE community has spoken, and the name and version of the new openSUSE release have been chosen. The project is undergoing some major changes, and they had to illustrate that with a name that sells it.

Red Hat Family

• As Red Hat, Inc.’s offerings become more enterprise-ready — and widely adopted — demands on its projects continue to increase. Ashesh Badani, GM of Cloud Product Strategy at Red Hat, joined theCUBE at RedHat Summit to talk about how its pipeline is structured to deliver reliable results.

• Equity Analysts at the Mizuho Securities maintains the rating on Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). The brokerage firm has issued a Buy rating on the shares. The Analysts at the ratings agency raises the price target from $85 per share to $88 per share.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) now offers Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA on the Amazon Web Services marketplace, ExecutiveBiz reported Thursday.

• Red Hat said Wednesday it sees the listing as providing clients more avenues with which to implement big data workload deployments and data analysis work.

• The availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA has been expanded to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat announced.

Fedora

• On my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon I’ve been running Fedora 21 for the past five months to great success. While I was using Ubuntu Linux on my “most main system” (and various Linux distributions on the dozens of other systems at Phoronix and in the test lab), prior to that I was a Fedora user back in the early days of Fedora (Core).

Debian Family

• Neil McGovern is the new Debian project leader, and he already made some contributions and opened up some important discussions within the project from his new position. He also revealed what he’s using on a daily basis.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has revealed some details in a security notice about a few Oxide vulnerabilities that have been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems.

• GPS Navigation is a free app for Ubuntu Touch, and it’s been getting constant updates for the past few weeks. It’s still in the development stages, but it looks like it’s coming together just nicely.

• A large part of the work that’s been done for Unity 8 is focused on making it looks and feel like Unity 7. Canonical is not trying to reinvent Unity; it’s rewriting it for the future.

• Intel has launched a Compute Stick in India. While the Intel stick will be available on Flipkart, iBall had also partnered with Intel to release its own stick-computer. Intel’s Compute stick will enable a user to transform a basic HDMI Tv or monitor into a fully functioning entry level computer.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 17.2 is the opposite. It’s focused on real improvements and polish for the desktops we use today. Like Linux Mint 17 and 17.1, the latest release is based on the stable Ubuntu 14.04 LTS core It’s basically the same under-the-hood. Instead, Mint’s developers have spent their time polishing and improving the desktop experience.

Devices/Embedded

• We love Python at the Raspberry Pi Foundation—it’s our go-to general purpose programming language for most projects and activities. Our home-brewed, Pi-optimized Linux distribution Raspbian (a Debian variant) ships with a number of different languages and educational tools (Scratch, Ruby, Java, C, Wolfram, Mathematica, and, of course, the numerous others available in Linux), but the one we and many others tend to choose is Python.

• A startup called Audeme has crossed the halfway mark on a $12,000 Kickstarter project for its MOVI (My Own Voice Interface) speech I/O shield for Arduino single board computers. An $80 early bird package ships in Feb. 2016, and a $100 package ships in Dec. 2015. The fundraising project ends on Aug. 10. The packages include access to low level serial interfaces that will enable developers to use MOVI with other SBCs such as the Raspberry Pi, says Audeme.

Phones

Tizen

• The Samsung Z3 SM-Z300H is going to be the second Tizen based Smartphone to begin testing in India and hopefully final release. We Initially reported on the existence of the Z3 with Sammobile confirming it will be the next Tizen mobile phone to be released. Now our friends at Best Tizen Apps have noticed a shipment of a few “SM-Z300H” Smartphones making the journey from Korea to Bangalore India, reported for testing purposes. The phone is shipped as costing $205 USD per unit around 13,039 INR, but this is more of a speculated price and does not reflect final retail pricing.

Free Software/Open Source

• Why would a software company choose to change its product from proprietary to open source? It turns out there are many good reasons, says Dan Mihai Dumitriu, CEO and CTO of networking software company Midokura. In this interview with The Enterprisers Project, Dumitriu explains the benefits.

• Anthropologists who traveled to the jungle to study various tribes would debate (half jokingly) whether to “go native”—that is, whether to adopt the lifestyle of the people they were trying to understand, or to keep their distance (and scientific objectivity). It was a research design choice, but also a fundamental choice about one’s identity as a more-than-interested visitor.

• Stormy Peters and Avni Khatri will present Grow an organization by planting volunteers at OSCON 2015. Peters is the vice president of technical evangelism at the Cloud Foundry and Khatri is president of Kids on Computers. In this talk, they share their experiences and lessons for growing a healthy garden of volunteers.

• This question came up during conversations with Red Hat’s Chris Wright, a Linux kernel developer and a principal software engineer with the company.

• Of course, in non-tech business speak, upstream tends to refer to production processes that involves searching for (and extracting) raw materials — in software, this is not the case.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has already announced the first Beta for Firefox 40, and it looks like Linux users are going to get some important improvements for scrolling and video playback, among other things.

• The Logjam SSL/TLS vulnerability is among the 13 security advisories in latest stable release of the open-source Firefox Web browser.

• MOZILLA HAS RELEASED the latest edition of Firefox, version 39, squishing four major bugs and adding the new features first seen in recent beta versions.

• The best reason to adopt the new version is its repairs for three critical bugs. Detailed here, the flaws include memory corruption and “exploitable crashes.” A further two “high” severity flaws, half a dozen rated “moderate” and a single “low” severity bug have also been squashed.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 5.0 is planned for release in early August and today Charles H. Schulz said this is “an unique release.” When it comes to features and styles Schulz said the broad range of changes and improvements will be easily visible to the user. With things like the Breeze iconset, enhancements to the sidebar, and improved menus “this is a very special and exciting release.”

CMS

• It sparked a heated debate. At that point, Open Source Software (OSS) wasn’t as widely received in the enterprise as it is today and many thought that its perceived advantage was limited to price (as in “it’s free software”).

Business

Openwashing

• SAP SE is dedicated to helping businesses respond to market demands around the clock, according to Steve Lucas, president of Platform Solutions at SAP. Its partnership with Red Hat, Inc. is a key part of its strategy. In an interview with theCUBE at RedHat Summit, Lucas explained further.

• Recently, Apple released its programming language, Swift 2, to the public. By releasing Swift to the open source community, Apple is giving software developers more access to and control over the programming language. This release opens up a myriad of exciting possibilities for application development, software advancements and increased functionality.

Project Releases

• Powerful video editor Shotcut has been updated again by its developers, and they’ve made some huge improvements to the application. To be fair, pretty much any update for Shotcut is impressive, but this one is an important one.

Public Services/Government

• The European Commission is about to make available as open source a prototype of LEOS, a software solution for drafting and automatic processing of legal texts. The software currently supports legal texts issued by the EC, yet can be extended to support other legislative processes.

Openness/Sharing

• Film producer James Cameron has announced that his innovative rotating Sun Flower design will be freely available to the public.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Thomas told Business Insider that in late 2013, after analyzing his budgets, he realized that keeping his own computers simply wasn’t a good idea.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• She endorses using cluster bombs, toxic agents and nuclear weapons in US war theaters. She calls them deterrents that “keep the peace.” She was one of only six Democrat senators opposed to blocking deployment of untested missile defense systems – first-strike weapons entirely for offense.

• From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos. The horrendous effects are still being felt.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Finance

• It is great news for majority of Ecuadorian citizens – but terrible nightmare for the ‘elites’.

• They no longer feel unique, no longer is this country their huge, private playground and a milking cow. The ‘elites’ still have money and their villas, as well as servants, luxury cars and regular trips to those lands they are faithfully serving – North America and Europe.

• But their status is diminishing. No longer they feel admired, no longer they are feared. Increasingly they are forced to play by rules and to respect local laws. That would be unimaginable just ten years ago. For some, this is the end of the world!

• The rich, the ‘elites’, are sour losers. In fact, they have no idea how to accept defeat. Never before in the history of this country they actually had to. To them this is new reality, this nation ruled by the government, which is working on behalf of the people. The ‘elites’ feel let down, cheated, even humiliated. They have no idea how to respect democracy (rule of the people). They only know how to make decisions, and to give orders, and to loot.

• This could lead to inevitable conflict, and Ecuador is not an exception. To greater or smaller extend, the same is happening in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and even in Chile. Immediately after people vote a socialist government in, immediately after the government begins working for the majority, the elites start reacting. Their goal is clear and predictable: to discredit the administration and to reverse the course.

• After securing a ‘no’ vote at Greek referendum on bailout, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis resigned, saying it would help Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras negotiate a better deal with foreign creditors.

• So from 2010 to 2015, Greece has cut government spending from roughly 13 billion euros to 10 billion euros–a cut of 23 percent. Unsurprisingly, this has had a devastating effect on Greece’s economy, with unemployment stuck above 25 percent since the end of 2012.

• In the Washington Post‘s eyes, though, Greece has not yet demonstrated the willingness to “trim its spending” that would merit a bailout.

• I think the lesson from this is that the 21st Century corporate and banking state is beyond amelioration. Any change needs to be a fundamental challenge to the system. It will seem strange to future generations that a system developed whereby middlemen who facilitated real economic transactions by handling currency, came to dominate the world by creating a mathematical nexus of currency that bore no meaningful relationship to real movements of commodities.

Censorship

• Reddit has been on a very rocky road lately, and now some of the site’s users are demanding that CEO Ellen Pao be replaced. The petition to remove Pao follows the CEO’s decision to remove popular Reddit employee Victoria Taylor.

• More than 130,000 people have signed a petition demanding the removal of Ellen Pao, Reddit Inc.’s interim chief executive officer, after she dismissed an executive and was accused of censoring online message boards.

Privacy

• Every time anyone uses a computer to send an e-mail, watch a video, do a Google search, or update a Facebook status, the National Security Agency (NSA) is probably collecting and collating that activity on one of its many servers.

• XKEYSCORE — the codename of the computer code used by the NSA to perform these actions — is massive and more intrusive than most people understand.

• On Sunday, while most of Twitter was watching the Women’s World Cup – an amazing game from start to finish – one of the world’s most notorious security firms was being hacked.

• Imagine you are the target of a phishing attack: Someone sends you an email attachment containing malware. Your email service provider shares the attachment with the government, so that others can configure their computer systems to spot similar attacks. The next day, your provider gets a call. It’s the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and they’re curious. The malware appears to be from Turkey. Why, DHS wants to know, might someone in Turkey be interested in attacking you? So, would your email company please share all your emails with the government? Knowing more about you, investigators might better understand the attack.

• Social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube would be required to report videos and other content posted by suspected terrorists to federal authorities under legislation approved this past week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

• The measure, contained in the 2016 intelligence authorization, which still has to be voted on by the full Senate, is an effort to help intelligence and law enforcement officials detect threats from the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

Civil Rights

• The FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Army have all bought controversial software that allows users to take remote control of suspects’ computers, recording their calls, emails, keystrokes and even activating their cameras, according to internal documents hacked from the software’s Italian manufacturer.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• EU officials jubilantly announced a deal on setting internet rules and ending roaming surcharges early Tuesday morning but the details of the deal contain several loose ends.

• Remarkably, this buyout of cyberspace has garnered almost no protest or media attention, in contrast to every other development in cyberspace such as the Communications Decency Act, and cyberporn. What hasn’t been discussed is the public’s right to free speech in cyberspace. What is obvious is that speech in cyberspace will not be free if we allow big business to control every square inch of the Net.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Israeli Internet providers are no longer required to block access to Popcorn Time websites. A District Court has lifted a preliminary injunction arguing that access restrictions are ineffective. The decision is a major disappointment for the local anti-piracy outfit ZIRA, which was also ordered to pay the legal fees of one of the ISPs.

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