● 07.24.15

● Links 24/7/2015: GNOME 3.17.4, Mozilla Developer Network Turns 10

Posted in News Roundup at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• As I learned more about Linux, it became easier to use with time. I was impressed by the contributions of open source developers to it as well. Use cases that were really hard for me at first became easier as more advancements were made in the Linux community. At one point, finding and installing codecs to play multimedia files was annoying, but later it became a cinch. Proprietary drivers (when absolutely necessary) required me to recompile my kernel, but it is now often just a checkbox. Free drivers have also made leaps and bounds.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation posted a schedule for LinuxCon + CloudOpen + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015 (Oct. 5-7), and expanded its training into India.

• Open source has always been about democracy, openness, and opportunity. In keeping with that spirit, at Linux Foundation Training we’re working to make high-quality professional Linux training available worldwide. As part of that, today we’re announcing region-specific pricing for India. Starting now, if you live in India, you’ll be able to purchase the LFS201 Essentials of System Administration bundle with included LFCS exam for 5,000 Rupees (~$79). This pricing is available only to residents of India.

• Linux Foundation announced its Essentials of System Administration course and Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator exam for individuals in India for $79 or Rs 5,000.

• This makes India the first region in which the Linux Foundation will offer country-specific pricing on select training and certification products.

Graphics Stack

• Marek Olšák of AMD finished landing the code needed today in Mesa for exposing the OpenGL 4.0 ARB_tessellation_shader by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

• Five years after the OpenGL 4.0 specification was introduced, the open-source Mesa 3D project has finally moved on to supporting the necessary extensions, the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver even exposes OpenGL 4.1 support this morning, and OpenGL 4.2 patches are pending.

• Wldbg supports a few different modes of operation from taking a list of modules and running functions on those modules for each message going through the Wayland function, there’s also a GDB-like interface for debugging Wayland clients, and there’s also a server mode for overtaking the bound socket and accepting all new connections.

• The news today of OpenGL 4 finally being accomplished in Mesa/Gallium3D is quite ironic and memorable as this day five years ago was when the R600 Gallium3D driver reached the milestone of being able to run glxgears on AMD hardware.

Benchmarks

Applications

• SmartGit, a graphical client for the version control systems Git and Mercurial with optimized workflows for multiple platforms, has been upgraded to version 7 preview 12 and is now ready for download and testing

• On July 22, Konstantin Dmitriev announced the first maintenance release for Synfig Studio, an open-source, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software solution that can be used for producing feature-film quality animations.

• The CMake 3.3 update brings new capabilities to the if(), add_dependencies(), and find commands along with various property improvements. CMake 3.3 has also deprecated Visual Studio 6/7 support and made other changes for developers relying upon this popular build system.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Don’t Be Patchman is a new game that will land on Steam for Linux in about a month. Beside the fact that it seems to be a very interesting title, it’s also probably the first one to launch on Linux, without a Windows or Mac version.

• Terraria, a 2D adventure game developed and published by Re-Logic on Steam, will finally get a Linux version. The makers of the game said on Twitter that a Linux version is incoming.

• Feral Interactive is one of the major studios out there that are porting important games for Linux users, and it looks like they are planning something big, but they don’t want to announce anything for certain.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’m glad to announce that a couple of new, long-awaited (5 and 7 years respectively!) features are going to land in Ark. Starting from the 15.08 release (which will be KF5-based)…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.17.4 is out. This is a development snapshot, so use it with caution.

• Among the new things in this release, you can find improved Wayland hi-dpi support in mutter, IP addresses for vms in gnome-boxes, MathML support in orca, performance improvements in tracker, events from different boots in gnome-logs, a new places view in the GTK+ file chooser, a new application preview: gnome-todo, and many small improvements and bug fixes all over the place.

• The GNOME 3 Human Interface Guidelines were released just under a year ago. They incorporated material from the GNOME 2 HIG, but they were also a thorough rework: the GNOME 3 HIG has a radically different structure from the GNOME 2 one, and is largely based on a collection of design patterns. The hope was that this collection could grow and evolve over time, ensuring that the HIG is always up to date with the latest design practice.

• On July 23, the GNOME Project announced that the third snapshot towards the Nautilus (Files) 3.18 file manager for the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment was available for download and testing.

• The hard working developers behind the highly acclaimed GNOME desktop environment used in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux have just finished a new milestone towards the anticipated GNOME 3.18 release.

• Mutter 3.17.4 is a bit more feature-rich this time around than the GNOME Shell updates. The new development version of Mutter has improved HiDPI handling on Wayland and support for compositor-side animated cursors. Another change to benefit Wayland is allowing basic configuration of dummy outputs when Mutter is running as a nested Wayland compositor.

• GNOME Shell 3.17.4 is now available, but it’s not the most exciting development release of recent times…

• On July 23, the GNOME Project, through Matthias Clasen, announced the release of the fourth development milestone towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due out on September 23, 2015.

Distributions

New Releases

• Jeff Hoogland today posted some updated information for fans of his Bodhi Linux distributions as well as requesting help testing new desktop Moksha. Elsewhere, Clement Lefebvre today said the upgrade path from 17.0 and 17.1 to 17.2 is now open to all. Also, The Linux Foundation today announced its keynote speakers for upcoming conferences in Dublin and QEMU is the Software Freedom Conservancy’s newest member.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• We reported a while ago that the openSUSE Project is producing a brand-new version of their RPM-based Linux distribution, called Leap, version 42, which will completely change the openSUSE operating system as we know it.

• While a milestone release of Leap has been imminent, it’s not coming out today as hoped for. Partially causing the delay is that Leap is moving over to the Linux 4.1 kernel than their previous Linux 3.x base.

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, the king of Linux and open source world; the only fully open source company to bag over a billion dollars in revenue, has announced the general availability of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 6.7, the latest update to RHEL 6 platform.

Fedora

• Jan Šilhan has announced that the DNF package manager tool used in the latest production version of the acclaimed Fedora Linux operating system reached version 1.0.2 on July 22, introducing some new attractive features, and patching those nasty issues reported by users since the previous version of the software.

• There are a lot of tools and applications connected to 3D printing available to Fedora users. In this article, I’ll guide you through one possible scenario of creating a 3D physical object: from an idea to a real thing.

• The team I manage at Red Hat, the Fedora Engineering team, includes people who work on Fedora system administration, release tooling, application development, and design. We have a job opening for an engineer to work with our infrastructure applications team on some challenging, fun, and forward-looking problems:

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Debian and Ubuntu are moving to update all C++ packages with GCC5, which was released in April. GCC stands for Gnu Compiler Collection, and it is used to convert source code to executable code and libraries. These compilers are used to build everything from the Linux kernel to user applications, so it’s a far-reaching change.

• GCC5 has introduced more fundamental updates than previous versions, as it is the first version to fully support the latest version of C++. This new standard, released in 2011, contains numerous improvements to the previous standard, which dates back to 1998. It gives developers the tools they need to build more stable software rapidly, at all levels of the Linux ecosystem.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical released details about a couple of LXC vulnerabilities that have been found and corrected in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, operating system.

• Canonical works on a few Ubuntu Touch branches at all times, besides the current stable one that everyone can get. From the looks of it, the development one is based on the new Wily Werewolf, and it’s receiving some interesting changes.

• After having published details about a new Linux kernel update for its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, Canonical has posted two more Ubuntu Security Notices informing users of the Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS OSes about the availability of kernel updates for their systems.

• On July 23, Canonical posted a new Ubuntu Security Notice informing all users of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system about the immediate availability of a kernel update.

• We reported a few days ago that the next major update for Canonical’s mobile operating system, Ubuntu Touch OTA-6, will arrive in approximately 6 weeks, around September 1, 2015 or at the end of August if we’re lucky.

Devices/Embedded

• Arbor is launching an Ubuntu-ready Type 6 Compact module with a dual-core 5th Gen Core CPU, -40 to 85°C operation, 12 USB ports, and eight PCIe slots.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung Electronics have announced the addition of four services that provide real-time on-screen Information on their Tizen based Smart TVs. You can display Information that relates to sports, news, entertainment, and social. The Information is displayed on the right hand side of the screen on a transparent window, and can be accessed via the TV remote when the viewer is watching cable TV or IPTV.

Android

• It’s easy to forget that Android is little more than a decade old. I fondly remember one of my first editors at CIO.com asking me to write a story about “WHAT ANDROID MEANS TO ENTERPRISE.” I write that title in capital letters, bold, italics, underline and quotation marks because the story was supposed to have gravity. This was in 2007 or 2008, when Android was more of a concept than something the average Joe could grasp in his hands. I was supposed to explain the mysterious OS, and quell the fears of CIOs, who worried the consumer software would make their jobs harder.

• In the world of Android-connected professionals, we tend to see two different types of people: those who design or develop for the platform, and those who observe and write about it.

• Liam Spradlin is a rare case of someone who falls equally into both categories.

• The latest Android-based smart TV platform – cunningly called Android TV – is by my reckoning Google’s third stab at becoming a force to be reckoned with in the smart TV world. Actually its fourth if you also include the early and little-seen Android 4.2 Jelly Bean effort introduced on a few high-end Philips TVs in a handful of European territories last year.

• The Android of 2015 is a world away from that 2008 version, where the Android Market was in its infancy, there were no native video playback capabilities and the G1 had no multi-touch support. But Google is going to have to keep innovating and improving its mobile OS to keep the lion’s share of the smartphone market.

• Infotainment systems are actually the worst part of a modern car. In fact, a study by Nielsen and SBD Consultancy found the systems in new cars to be the biggest cause of customer complaints. Much like during the beginnings of the modern smartphone, the car infotainment trend takes a bunch of manufacturers that traditionally have only made hardware and asks them to create software. It should be no surprise that they are terrible at it. (And that says nothing of their typical sloth-ish product cycles.)

• One of the more recent discoveries resulting from the breach two weeks ago of malware-as-a-service provider Hacking Team is sure to interest Android enthusiasts. To wit, it’s the source code to a fully featured malware suite that had the ability to infect devices even when they were running newer versions of the Google-developed mobile operating system.

• The leak of the code base for RCSAndroid—short for Remote Control System Android—is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it provides the blueprints to a sophisticated, real-world surveillance program that can help Google and others better defend the Android platform against malware attacks. On the other, it provides even unskilled hackers with all the raw materials they need to deploy what’s arguably one of the world’s more advanced Android surveillance suites.

• A respected security researcher has denied any involvement with Hacking Team after open-source code he wrote was found in smartphone spyware sold by the surveillance-ware maker.

Free Software/Open Source

• In this sense, software commons make sense, and because these commons do not effectively exist in some village somewhere in Europe during the Middle Ages, but much rather all over the Internet, they are of primary importance for software and for the world we live in.

• On the third day of OSCON, I heard Facebook’s James Pearce deliver one of the convention’s many keynote presentations.

• Pearce explained how Facebook does open source at scale. And according to him, Facebook launches several open source projects every month and has hundreds of engineers supporting those projects on an ongoing basis—all while they’re engaging with communities around the world to make software experiences better.

• But more interesting than how Facebook does this is the question of why they use, support, and release open source projects at a

• IBM has set up a new code repository that aims to foster collaborative development of enterprise open source software — and it may also drum up interest in its own Bluemix platform services.

• The right storage solution is critical for business, but the price tag can put many options out of reach. Luckily, there’s a host of powerful, scalable open source candidates to choose from.

• However, open-source software and hardware has become the platform of choice for developers for next-generation drone technology. Mature alternatives exist in the open-source realm. From OpenPilot to Dronecode, these projects emphasize customizability and offer ways to collaborate on development and support that are not possible with proprietary systems. For every layer of the drone, from flight code to firmware, to vision processing and collision avoidance, there are viable open-source options.

• When a company decides to embrace open-source software development, releasing the code under a suitable license is only the tip of the iceberg. The real challenge that companies face is learning how to attract and collaborate with contributors.

• Monoid, designed by Andreas Larsen, is designed to be sleek and precise. Every single character in Monoid’s library has been designed by Larsen to be beyond easy to tell apart, so you don’t ever have to worry about confusing thetas, o’s, O’s, and 0’s (zeros). The font is also monospaced (each character takes up the same width), so it makes it easy to skim your code and spot any errors that might be fudging things up. The spacing between the characters is small, however, so you can fit as much as you need into a line of code. What makes Monoid even better is the fact that it’s alive. Since it’s an open source font, it can be adjusted and perfected over time by the very people that use it. You can check out Monoid at the link below.

• Non programmers can write docs. They can design logos. They can help with user interface design. They can test fixes or new features. They can triage bugs by verifying that the submitted report can be recreated and adding additional details, logs, or config files. Larger projects need some infrastructure support that is more administration and security compliance than Java programmer. Many people who consider themselves non-programmers do have some pretty good scripting skills and can assist with packaging for distributions.

• Leading vendor-independent Linux certification organization extends commitment to furthering the adoption of Linux and Open Source.

Events

• At OSCON, Purism has on hand the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops – the numbers designating the screen size (13-inch and 15-inch, respectively) — which are both designed, chip-by-chip and line-by-line to respect your rights to privacy, security and freedom, which is Purism’s philosophy.

• Like many of the Linux/FOSS events that dot the calendar year, OSCON resembles that — Bonnaroo without the mosh pit (though now that I’ve written that, let’s see if something like that appears in Austin next year) — but along with the camaraderie there’s also an element of “high school reunion” in the mix.

• “Big Blue” unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM plans to release 50 projects to the open source community to speed adoption in the enterprise sector and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile and analytics, among other areas.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today, Mozilla proudly celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Mozilla Developer Network, one of the richest and also one of the few multilingual resources on the Web for documentation. It started in February 2005, when a small team dedicated to the open Web took DevEdge (Netscape’s developer materials) and set out to create an open, free, community-built online resource for all Web developers. Just a couple of months later, on 23 July, 2005 the original MDN wiki site launched and has evolved steadily ever since for the convenience and the benefit of its users.

SaaS/Big Data

• President of Huawei Central Software Wang Chenglu insists that open source is in the firm’s blood from core business networking (where the firm helped drive the network openness as founding member of OPNFV), to cloud computing and the IoT (where the firm open sourced LiteOS — a lightweight IoT Operating System).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project known by many in the open source worlds as rms, is not the sort of person you’d expect to endorse a product. But Stallman and the FSF have formed a partnership of sorts with Crowd Supply, a crowdfunding company that has been largely focused on open source hardware and software projects.

Project Releases

• I’ve released man-pages-4.01. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

• This release resulted from patches, bug reports,and comments from nearly 50 contributors. As well as a large number of minor fixes to over 100 man pages, the more significant changes in man-pages-4.01 include the following.

Public Services/Government

• The French government has published templates to be used by procurement officers when requesting free software-based ICT solutions. The templates include intellectual property clauses, and clarify the specifics of the free software environment.

Licensing

• Today, Software Freedom Conservancy proudly welcomes QEMU, the generic machine emulator and virtualizer, as a member project. QEMU is now one of many free and open source software projects who call Conservancy their non-profit corporate home.

Openness/Sharing

• It is an idea that has not set the country on fire, but has been noticed all over the world. For a few years now, it has been knocking at the doors of international technology awards, but losing out in the end to far more extraordinary innovations. It has also been among the few, if not the only, ideas from India to get an entire session at an American Chemical Society meeting. It is called the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) model. With a bit of luck and commitment, it could break new ground in drug discovery and development.

Standards/Consortia

• Microsoft could get the boot from the French government if a new recommendation from an official advisor is adopted.

• DISIC (Direction interministérielle des systèmes d’information et de communication de l’État) has recommended that French authorities ditch Microsoft Office tools in favour of the Open Document Format (ODF).

• DISIC is responsible for harmonising and reducing the costs of all state computers, including government ministries, state and regional departments and local authorities, and sees ODF as the best way to make them all interoperable.

• According to sources, an initial draft of the report envisaged outlawing Microsoft’s Open XML altogether, although with some agencies using tools specifically developed for use with Open XML, DISIC relented.

Leftovers

• Barack Obama has urged the United Kingdom to stay with the European Union.

• The US President also said that the UK is his nation’s “best partner” during an interview with the BBC on Thursday.

• “Having the United Kingdom in the European Union gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union,” he said during an interview with the broadcaster before his visit to Kenya.

Security

• Some measure of protection is afforded by the fact that attackers will need a way to log in to a vulnerable site with at least Contributor privileges.

• Hackers are running rings round our technophobe police and the companies we rely upon every day. Who can blame them, asks Emma Barnett

• This is a big deal. Hackers can remotely hack the Uconnect system in cars just by knowing the car’s IP address.

• Customers who hired the infamous ID theft-protection firm Lifelock to monitor their identities after their data was stolen in a breach were in for a surprise. It turns out Lifelock failed to properly secure their data.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• While beefing up NATO’s military presence in Europe Washington should refrain from deploying more US nuclear weapons in EU countries, senior fellow of the Brookings Institution Steven Pifer said.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Co-host Steve Doocy later worried that the loans amounted to “discrimination” in favor of Muslims, while network analyst Peter Johnson, Jr, said that it “opens up a lot of questions” such as concerns about “legitimatizing a law that is really inimical to American values.”

• A Fox News report on the so-called “unintended consequences” of Seattle, Washington’s municipal minimum wage increase included the unsubstantiated claim that better pay is encouraging workers to work less so that they stay in poverty and continue receiving government benefits. This report fits the network’s anti-minimum wage, poor-shaming narrative, but ignores the many benefits of increasing the minimum wage.

• Comcast executive David Cohen is, by dictionary definition, a lobbyist. And not just any lobbyist; a gushing profile piece by the Washington Post in 2012 called him a “wonk rock star” and the company’s “secret weapon,” who uses “his vast network of high-powered contacts” to help craft Comcast-friendly regulations and apply pressure on DC policy makers. You know, a lobbyist. Unless you’re Comcast, which has now e-mailed me repeatedly to demand I stop calling him that.

Privacy

• As an Eisenhower Fellow, Dr. David A. Bray had the opportunity to travel to Taiwan and Australia in a personal capacity to discuss the burgeoning privacy and security challenges that the Internet of Everything era presents. Throughout his meetings, everyone asked: who is responsible for ensuring security? Answering as an Eisenhower Fellow in a personal capacity, Bray was always quick to answer: Everyone is.

Civil Rights

• During the traffic stop that led to her arrest and, ultimately, her death in a Texas jail, Sandra Bland repeatedly questioned the decisions of state Trooper Brian Encinia and asserted rights she said Encinia was violating.

• A close look at the police car dashcam video that recorded the exchange shows her questions had merit: Encinia at every occasion escalates the tension. He tells Bland, a Black Lives Matter activist, she’s under arrest before she has even left her car, shouts at her for moving after ordering her to move, refuses to answer questions about why she’s being arrested and, out of the camera’s view, apparently slams her to the ground. He gets testy with her — “Are you done?” — when she explains after he points out she seems irritated. And, contrary to a recent Supreme Court decision, he unconstitutionally extends the traffic stop, it appears, out of spite.

• A Guantanamo prisoner balked at working with his defense lawyers due to a possible conflict of interest Wednesday, prompting an indefinite recess in his pretrial hearing in Cuba.

• Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi told the military judge Wednesday he wished to stop conferring with the two lawyers assigned to his case, at least temporarily. During the recess, prosecutors will try to arrange a meeting between al-Hadi and one of his former attorneys in hopes of resolving the issue.

• Sandra Bland’s arrest and death are a national scandal. The police are responsible.

• Attorney John W. Whitehead opens a recent posting (see below) on his Rutherford Institute website with these words from a song by Bob Dylan. Why don’t all of us feel ashamed? Why only Bob Dylan?

• I wonder how many of Bob Dylan’s fans understand what he is telling them. American justice has nothing to do with innocence or guilt. It only has to do with the prosecutor’s conviction rate, which builds his political career. Considering the gullibility of the American people, American jurors are the last people to whom an innocent defendant should trust his fate. The jury will betray the innocent almost every time.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Animal-shaped pillows are cute and fluffy, except when they spur litigation. Recently, the Milo & Gabby brand sued Amazon for IP infringement because merchants allegedly sold knockoffs of its “Cozy Companion Pillowcases.” Amazon has successfully avoided IP liability for its marketplace, and a recent ruling rejected most of Milo & Gabby’s claims. However, a key piece of Milo & Gabby’s claim survived Amazon’s dismissal attempt, leaving the possibility that Amazon could be liable for merchants’ IP violations.

Copyrights

• The European Union has today launched an antitrust investigation against several large U.S. movie studios and Sky UK. The European Commission wants to abolish geographical restrictions and has sent a statement of objections over the geo-blocking practices of six major US film studios including Disney, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.

• Google search results sometimes include a tiny message at the bottom that some sites have been removed for sharing pirated content.

• Those requests come from movie studios and other content rights holders who manually submit links to be taken down.

• What’s pretty hilarious is movie studios have been submitting takedown requests that include links to pirated content stored on their own desktop computers.

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