● 08.20.15

● Links 20/8/2015: Fedora 24 Plans, Ubuntu Phones in India

Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Chromebooks have proven to be extremely popular devices, with many getting rave reviews on Amazon from very satisfied customers.

• US Business-to-business (B2B) sales* of notebooks running Google’s Chrome OS passed 50% between June and early July 2015, with overall education season sales up almost 40% over the same period last year.

Desktop

• Like it or not, email isn’t dead yet. And for Linux power users who live and die by the command line, leaving the shell to use a traditional desktop or web based email client just doesn’t cut it. After all, if there’s one thing that the command line excels at, it’s letting you process files, and especially text, with uninterrupted efficiency.

• Chromebooks have been burning up the sales charts at Amazon for a long time now, but it can be difficult for newcomers to figure out which model to buy. Paste Magazine has a helpful list of the ten best Chromebooks you can buy right now.

• The new Dell Chromebook 13 is a well-equipped machine aimed at business users who want all-day battery life and high performance.

• Chromebook isn’t for everyone, particularly those people who need to use legacy applications. For the rest, if whatever you need works in the browser, you’re set for Chrome OS. Perhaps Acer’s hunk, or something smaller.

• Chromebook sales have been red hot on Amazon, with various models regularly getting great reviews and comments from Amazon customers. But not everybody is in love with Chrome OS. Some folks prefer to run Linux and Expert Reviews has a helpful how-to that will guide you through the install process.

• Hulu is an American streaming service that provides users with a selection of TV shows, movies, and pretty much anything in between. The online company was using Flash for the service, but now they have added a new layer of DRM and Linux users are no longer able to use it.

Server

• For the moment the Linux-only abilities of StorPool are something to which the company is cutting its cloth to suit. And so the bulk of its target customers are service providers which already run a lot of Linux – among whom it claims deployments of up to several hundred TB – although it also aims at devops use cases in wider verticals.

• …high performance and tightly integrated Cray Linux…

Kernel Space

• Torvalds replied, “I don’t think I’m all that powerful, but I’m glad to get all the credit for open source.” For someone who’s arguably been more influential on technology than Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Larry Ellison, Torvalds remains amusingly modest. That’s probably one reason Torvalds, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, remains the unchallenged leader of Linux.

• “The only real solution to security is to admit that bugs happen,” Torvalds said, “and then mitigate them by having multiple layers, so if you have a hole in one component, the next layer will catch the issue.”

• Once upon a time open source was the mortal enemy of the providers of IT products and, by extension, their channel partners. But over the last couple of months it’s become evident that IT vendors have begun to co-opt the open source movement.

• Immediately after announcing the release of the Linux kernel 4.1.6 LTS and Linux kernel 3.10.87 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the fifty-one maintenance release of the Linux 3.14 LTS kernel.

• In a morning keynote presentation at LinuxCon, Michael Miller (Vice President of Global Alliances, Marketing and Product Management for SUSE), described himself as just a guy who likes technology. He’s also a guy who reads Scientific American and who thought that by 2015 we would all be flying jet packs to work.

• NTP is essential to the internet. Without it, servers and PCs wouldn’t know what time it is. That, in turn, would mean backups would fail, financial transactions would go awry, and many fundamental network services wouldn’t work. The primary time-keepers of the net are stratum-0 devices, i.e. atomic clocks. These are connected to other devices with NTP, which in turn set the time for everything online.

• In an entertaining afternoon talk at LinuxCon North America, titled “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Rock Star Developers,” Rikki Endsley (Community Evangelist, Red Hat) discussed why the “rock star developer” label has outlived its usefulness and how Willie Nelson can be seen as a model for open source development.

• Today, Jim Zemlin (Executive Director at The Linux Foundation) opened LinuxCon North America in Seattle with a welcoming keynote. Here is a quick summary of this morning’s keynote addresses.

• The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative is reaching out to the community to help determine which open-source projects practice good security methods.

• LinuxCon was the talk of the town this week with their announcements dominating the headlines. In other news, Ian Murdock blogged about how he came to Linux with a big thanks to Linus himself. Speaking of Linus, he made several headlines with his Q&A at LinuxCon this morning. Antergos got an update today, after my not having much luck with the last release last night. Dedoimedo said the Cinnamon desktop isn’t “all sugar and spice” and Matthew Garrett didn’t get a satisfying answer on intellectual property from Shuttleworth at LinuxCon.

• How does anyone know if any given open-source project is following security best practices? That’s a question that the Linux Foundation is now trying to answer with a new program announced at the LinuxCon conference here.

• Emily Ratliff, senior director of infrastructure security at the Linux Foundation, announced the new badging effort in a press conference with media and analysts. She said the program is akin to the badges used on the popular Github code-development and -sharing site.

• As part of the kickoff for the Linuxcon Containercon conference here there was An Evening with Containers on August 16. Seven speakers in total each delivered 5 minute lightning talks about different topics related to containers.

• Just noticed this short video and I thought it might interest some. I already have a “career in Linux” myself. How about you?

• The project is designed to create a collaborative environment among top industry leaders and academic institutions to drive both improvements and enterprise innovation on the mainframe. The project will initially focus on reinforcing four key areas: scalability, availability, performance and security.

• On the final day of LinuxCon North America 2015, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin welcomed a “surprise” guest, Linus Torvalds, to the stage for a brief Q&A session. Zemlin read quotes from a recent article about Torvalds, The creator of Linux on the future without him, which said, “Torvalds may be the most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years.” Torvalds jokingly responded, “I love open source and how all the credit goes to me,” but then he explained that the power he has over the Linux kernel is just the power to say no—he doesn’t actually write the code anymore.

Applications

• The APT (Advanced Package Tool) is getting ready to receive some pretty important new features and developers are saying that this is probably the best version to be released. It’s still under production, but we can only hope that it will arrive much faster than the previous 1.0 branch.

• Moritz Bunkus announced the release and immediate availability for download of the third point release of his ever popular MKVToolNix 8 open-source software for manipulating Matroska (MKV) files under GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows OSes.

• Shotcut is an impressive video editor that runs on multiple platforms and which also happens to be open source. Its makers usually push a new update out the door each week and now it’s time for another one.

• APT (Advanced Package Tool) is the default package manager of Debian, Ubuntu and their derivative systems.

• The developers of the open-source Rygel software, a Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) media server distributed as part of the GNOME Project, have released a new milestone towards version 0.28 of the application.

• The Ardour project is pleased to announce the release of 4.2. This is primarily a bug fix release, but the list of fixes is long, and we’ve also replaced the audio/MIDI IO backend for Windows with completely new code which we think will address some of the issues faced on that platform. This release also sees the return of downloads for Apple PowerPC platforms.

• The Ardour software has been updated recently to version 4.2, a release that brings a huge number of new features covering almost all of the application’s core functionality. Ardour 4.2 has been released for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• It has never even been a serious contender in the race. In my opinion, most TTS applications in Linux have remained in hobbyist mode since inception. And I’m sure that statement will chap the ass of many, but a simple comparison between all of the Linux programs using TTS vs. Mac, Windows, and even the mobile market will bear me out. Hopefully we can raise enough awareness to at least see some forward movement on TTS in Linux. Hopefully.

• Yarock 1.1.3 was released recently with a new radio service: Radionomy (which has replaced Shoutcast), support for importing APE files in the playqueue, MP4 audio tag reading and more.

Proprietary

• Accusoft has added Linux support in its release of Barcode Xpress. The company says that Linux support provides even greater versatility to Barcode Xpress and equips developers with a fast, accurate and easy-to-use SDK that simplifies adding barcode reading and writing into Web and mobile applications. Besides Linux, Barcode Xpress currently supports Windows, Android or iOS operating systems and .NET, JAVA and C/C++.

• Vivaldi, a new web browser built by one of the Opera founders and his team, has brought a number of new features including a web panel and lots of other improvements.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Orion Trail, a new single-player adventure developed and published by Schell Games on Steam, has been released on the Linux platform as well.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• When Bodhi Linux came out with version 3.1.0 a week or so ago, the distro’s founder and lead developer, Jeff Hoogland, made it clear on the Bodhi website that this was a milestone release.

• “This release is a bigger deal for the Bodhi team than our previous update releases have been in the past,” he wrote. “The reason for this is because this release is the first to use the Moksha Desktop which we have forked from E17. Because it is built on the rock solid foundation that E17 provides, even this first release of the Moksha Desktop is stable and is something I feel comfortable using in a production environment.”

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• August 19, 2015. Today KDE released KDE Applications 15.08.

• With this release a total of 107 applications have been ported to KDE Frameworks 5. The team is striving to bring the best quality to your desktop and these applications. So we’re counting on you to send your feedback.

• Linux Mint 17.2 KDE felt solid and responsive to me, apart from one occurrence that I mentioned above.

• It is based on a solid distribution and adds some useful features like necessary codecs.

• KDE always had its fans for the convenience, high level of integration and the ease of navigation. On the flipside, KDE is usually considered a Desktop Environment for high-performance hardware.

• Weeeee! KDE is sponsoring Randa Meetings again, this time with touch. And you can help making KDE technologies even better! This exciting story in the Dot this week, https://dot.kde.org/2015/08/16/you-can-help-making-kde-technologies-even-better caught not only my attention, but my pocketbook as well.

• Finally it is ready: Kdenlive 15.08 is an important accomplishment!

• As we all know we have our final evaluation of our GSOC project next week. I have completed my project and would like to display how the integration between Cantor and LabPlot works.

• KDE Connect is nowadays on a sweet moment where many things can happen. This is an interesting moment to sprint, because it will allow all of us to work together on interesting features that can then be merged at once with greater impact.

• In Qt we have the Platform Abstraction (QPA) which allows to better interact with the used windowing system through a plugin. In case of KWin we use the “xcb” plugin on X11 and on Wayland we used to use the “wayland” plugin provided by QtWayland. For quite some time I had been thinking about migrating away from those and use an own KWin-specific plugin at least for Wayland.

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 3.5.0.

• The most apparent new feature in this version is probably the highlighting that we added to the editors’ vertical scroll bars. You can now easily see where bookmarks, breakpoints, warnings, errors and search results are located in the open document.

• These are but a few things the KDE contributors are going to focus on in Randa. All in all there should be something for everyone to get behind and support.

• Today KDE released KDE Applications 15.08, the collection of more than 150 applications. This release features the Kontact Suite and Dolphin ported to KDE Frameworks 5.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The developers of the famous GTK+ GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit are hard at work these days preparing for the final release of the GTK+ 3.18 software, which will be distributed as part of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.

• The development team behind the GNOME Project is hard at work these days preparing to release the first Beta build of the upcoming GNOME Control Center app, an essential component of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.

• The first Beta build of the upcoming Orca 3.18 open-source screen reader and magnifier software, which is used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions by default, has been made available for download and testing.

• Thanks to recent investigating by NVIDIA’s Aaron Plattner and GNOME’s Rui Matos, the NVIDIA screen update/flickering problems should be solved. Aaron earlier this month posted a patch for fixing a GL_EXT_x11_sync_object race condition within GNOME Mutter’s compositor. Fixing that code in the compositor plus other work by Rui should fix things up for affected binary NVIDIA users.

• GUADEC 2015 was a lot of fun, from preparation till the conference happening. I gave a lightning talk on my work on Polari, a talk on GNOME’s release videos and a talk at FOSSGBG on my experience getting started in GNOME.

• GUADEC is the GNOME project’s primary annual event, held every year in a different European city. This year, it was the turn of Gothenburg, Sweden. The conference brought together contributors, enthusiasts and partners from around the world for three days of talks, followed by three days of workshops (called “Birds of a Feather” sessions). It ran between the 6th and 12th of August.

Distributions

New Releases

• Kali is the successor to BackTrack, and is a Debian-based Linux distribution that includes hundreds of penetration-testing tools pre-installed and ready to go. Just boot it from a USB drive or live DVD and you’ll have a penetration-testing—or “hacking”—environment with all the tools you might want just waiting for you to fire them up.

• Steven Shiau published a new development version of his popular Clonezilla Live project, version 2.4.2-41, which incorporates multiple new features, updated components, and various bugfixes.

• Today we are pleased to announce the release of Cnchi v0.10 as the new stable version of our installer. As always, we put great effort into squashing bugs and improving code quality. One other area of focus during this development cycle was making Cnchi more reliable. To that end, Cnchi’s download module received what basically amounts to a total rewrite.

• Antergos is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux that follows the same rolling release model. Its developers have just released a new version of the Cnchi installer, which has made some great progress.

• The IPFire development team, through Michael Tremer, had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the Core Update 93 for the open-source IPFire 2.17 firewall software.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• Manjaro developers have released a version of their distro powered by the latest KDE Plasma 5.4, which is still in development stages. The results are very interesting and offer a polished and very different desktop.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat’s work in the project included integration support of Huawei’s FusionServer E9000, CloudEdge platform, virtualized evolved packet core and virtualized Multi-Service Engine with Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6. Red Hat also provided MANO support.

• In June, author and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst appeared on an episode of theCUBE, where he shared his thoughts on leading an open organization and the future of organizational decision making. Below is a video of that appearance—on Wednesday, June 24, 2015—along with a transcript of the conversation for the first six and a half minutes. This is a transcription.

Fedora

• The Fedora Server folks want to stop producing i686 installation media for Fedora Server beginning with Fedora 24. “The Fedora Server SIG has determined that we no longer feel that i686 install media is critical to our success. Since delivering and maintaining each install medium requires significant effort, the Server SIG has decided to stop shipping i686 media. This includes both the Server Install DVD and the Server Network Install ISO…This will reduce the maintenance burden on Fedora QA, reduce the compose time for rel-eng and reduce user confusion as to which version of Fedora Server to install,” reads this Fedora change proposal.

• Good progress for GNOME/Fedora om Wayland is being made, but the default transition will not happen for this fall’s release of Fedora 23. Developers want one feature-complete release before switching the default, and they’re hoping with GNOME 3.18 in Fedora 23 will be that milestone. Thus the target is on making the switch happen for Fedora 24 early next year.

• As you may already know, the Red Hat developers are working hard at Wayland, a next generation display server that will slowing get adopted in RHEL, CentOS and Fedora systems.

• At flock, mattdm, I and others were discussing the need to replace the message about Rawhide that it kills babies, eats kittens, etc.

• So I realized I hadn’t posted a Wayland update in a while. So we are still making good progress on Wayland, but the old saying that the last 10% is 90% of the work is definitely true here. So there was a Wayland BOF at GUADEC this year which tried to create a TODO list for major items remaining before Wayland is ready to replace X.

• This blog post looks at the final part of creating secure software: shipping it to users in a safe way. It explains how to use transport security and package signatures to achieve this goal.

• A few days ago, the touchpad on my HP 2000 Notebook PC began acting up. It would jitter around a lot and insert phantom mouse clicks. My desktop ended up with approximately Avogadro’s number of Notes widgets. At first, I thought the touchpad was going bad. I resigned myself to a life of using a USB mouse, at least until I could buy a replacement.

• There are a few fedora packages that rely on jemalloc. If you have a chance to help testing, please recompile and test the package against the updated version. You can leave comments here, or send me a mail.

• Google Summer of Code 2015 has come to an end. And yes I am satisfactory to a certain level that I have produced something tangible and all of you are able to access it which is deployed in Openshift. And here is the link: http://askbotfedoratest-anuradhaw.rhcloud.com. The github repository which contains the code is here: https://github.com/anuradha1992/askbotfedoratest. We are planning to merge the code with the repo at https://github.com/fedoradesign/askbot-test so that others can also use it and build upon it.

Debian Family

• The Debian Project has announced that it has joined forces with Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that acts as a home for open-source and free software projects, to create the Debian Copyright Aggregation Project.

• I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, when I was an undergraduate at Purdue University. At the time, I was a student in the Krannert School of Management, and a childhood love of computers had just been reawakened by a mandatory computer programming course I had taken during the fall semester (we were given the choice between COBOL and FORTRAN—which even in 1992 seemed highly dated—and I had picked COBOL because it seemed the more “business” of the two).

• Every package maintainer should remove one of their packages from the archive.

• It’s dead simple. It is acceptable to adopt a package to replace the one that has been removed, or to add a new one to the archive.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s IP policy seems to remain a hot topic to this day, especially for developers. A conversation between Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, and Matthew Garrett, a prominent Linux developer and one of the opponents of Canonical’s IP policy, revealed some interesting information.

• The Ubuntu 15.04, 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been updated in order to fix an important Django vulnerability that has been identified.

• Canonical’s Michi Henning wrote a very interesting article on his blog, where he explains in detail how he, James Henstridge and Xavi Garcia Mena managed to implement a fast and scalable thumbnailing services for both Ubuntu Linux and Ubuntu Touch operating systems.

• Linux users don’t really get to see a lot of concepts for desktops, but from time to time we get to experience some pretty interesting designs. The same can be said about the Ubuntu 16.04 Stupendously Hot Charmander concept, which looks superb.

• The famous “almost invisible and difficult to make appear when you need them most” scrollbars in Unity 7 are going away, and they are being replaced by the upstream version from GNOME.

• The new OTA update for Ubuntu Touch is in the works, and it looks like it’s entering its last stages. It’s in the hand of the QA team, and it should be out in the next couple of weeks.

• Many of us are familiar with Android and iOS devices but those interested in an alternative operating system may be pleased that two Ubuntu-running smartphones are now arriving for India. The BQ Aquaris E5 HD and Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition phones have been priced at the India launch and will be available from Snapdeal by the end of this month.

• Canonical has just announced that Aquaris E4.5 and E5 Ubuntu Editions will launch in India through Snapdeal, which is the biggest online marketplace in that country.

• With Ubuntu 15.10 (currently in development, to be released on October 22), Unity will stop using its original overlay scrollbars for GTK3 apps and switch to Gnome’s scrollbars instead.

• Android, iOS and Windows Phone are usual culprits within the mobile space in India but over the years we have seen options like Firefox, Tizen and Sailfish trying their luck. And now, there’s a new entrant into the market and the geeks might be familiar with this name i.e. Ubuntu.

• As you may know, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf has finally managed to make the transition to GCC 5.x, the same change being already implemented on Ubuntu Touch.

• As you may know, Canonical’s end game is to make Ubuntu the first mobile-desktop convergent system available on the OS market. In order to achieve that, they are working at a new display server called Mir, porting the Unity 8 interface, currently available on Ubuntu Touch, to Ubuntu desktop and created the snappy packages, which are enhanced click packages.

• We reported two weeks ago that Canonical launched a new contest for Ubuntu fans who want to win an Ubuntu phone device and many other goodies, which should have been ended on August 17, 2015.

Flavours and Variants

• Recently, I have installed and tested Linux Mint 17.2, and found it quite adorable. One of the major improvements the distribution brings to the proverbial Penguin table is a set of stylistic and functional changes to its settings menu, including the way you manage themes, icons, extensions, and the rest of the desktop bits and pieces. All of that, in a review, coming soon. But that’s only one side of the story.

• According to a Launchpad bug report, a new application, called Xfce Panel Switch, should be included by default with Xubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf. The package is currently in the Wily new queue.

• As you may know, CinnXP is a theme for Cinnamon that makes the system look like Windows XP. Despite the fact that Windows XP is dead, it is still used on old systems and a lot of Linux distributions try to mimic its design.

Devices/Embedded

• A US company has created a modular embedded Linux board which it hopes will be used across the entire product development cycle from evaluation, development, prototyping to finish product.

• Axiomtek’s “MANO842″ Mini-ITX board runs Linux on a quad-core Bay Trail Celeron, and offers PCIe, mini-PCIe, SATA, and a choice of ATX 12V or 12V DC power.

• ADI has taken the opportunity this month to unveil a new addition to their range of MinnowBoard development boards during the IDF event this week.

• Clever Year 7 students at Thirsk School have devised an amazing tracking system for the International Space Station and have become Astro Pi competition winners. We speak to their teacher, Dan Aldred, to find out more…

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung has already teased us about their upcoming Next Gear Smartwatch, the Gear S2, and now that teased video from Samsung Unpacked 2015 Episode 2 can be seen in its full glory. We will see the launch of the new circular watch faced Smartwatch next month on September 03 in Berlin at IFA 2015.

• Belvek, a company known for their Gear watch faces, have released “The Piston Watch”, which is a “carefully crafted watch face that is beautiful work of art with smoothly animated gears and engine piston”. It has an Interesting Piston running in the background with some rotating cogs.

Android

• Intel at its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco showcased new products that the company has been working on. At the event, Intel in collaboration with Google announced the Project Tango Developer Kit for smartphones using its RealSense technology.

• The company stressed that this will provide opportunity for developers to create new depth-sensing software for Android smartphone developer kit. Intel confirmed that the developer kit is targeted for release to select Android developers by the end of this year.

• Google’s Android One initiative, which launched last year with the aim of standardizing low-cost smartphones in developing markets, is expanding into six countries in Africa. Google is launching a new Android One smartphone built by Hong Kong manufacturer Infinix in Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Morocco, offering free software updates for the Android 5.1 device (including the upcoming OS Android M) in partnership with South African mobile service provider MTN. Google says it’s also working on extending its offline functionality for YouTube to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Egypt in the “coming months,” making it possible for users to store videos locally for up to 48 hours

• Ahead of Google’s major reset of Android One, the company has launched its first device in the category in Africa.

• Damn it, Google. Every time you announce a new major Android release, I end up throwing away hours of hard gym work and stuffing pounds of sugary sweets into my grinning cake-hole. And now you’ve just done it again.

• Oh, who am I kidding? I’d be eating the sweet stuff either way. But Google’s habit of naming Android releases after desserts (or “tasty treats,” if you want to get technical about it) sure doesn’t help.

• The standout feature of the global edition of MIUI 7 — which launches in beta on August 24 and still looks a lot like Apple’s iOS — is probably a partnership with Opera which, the companies claim, will compress mobile data usage in browsers and other apps by as much as 50 percent. The feature makes use of Opera’s Max technology — which now works with YouTube and Netflix videos — and is baked into MIUI 7 under the ‘Data Saver’ feature. Also filed under performance, Xiaomi claimed that the newest version of its software can help apps run up to 30 percent faster, while consuming 10 less battery life.

• Blass also tweeted images that appeared to show another BlackBerry device running Android. The second device doesn’t have a slider, looking instead like the company’s Passport, a big and square smartphone that would — if the leaks are accurate — now run Google’s operating system.

• Meet the FrankenBlackBerry. Is it an Android phone? Is it a BlackBerry? No, it’s the new BlackBerry Android phone! If you ever wondered what would happen if you slapped a BlackBerry keyboard onto an average Android phone, look no further. BlackBerry has this device for you.

• Notorious leaker Evan Blass shared a rendering of the new device on Twitter. It’s everything you’ve ever dreamed, and probably even a bit more. As you can see on the picture, it runs stock Android. BlackBerry opted for a more traditional 16:9 display instead of its tiny square-ish displays as well.

• Obviously, only selected Xperia mobile devices will be upgraded to Android M, but the question is: which one will get to the list? If you have an Xperia Z device, you’ll be curious to know if you’ll receive the official software upgrade, so we’ll tell you which models are eligible to get the technical preview.

• Earlier this month, Google launched Android Experiments, a site showcasing mobile apps, similar to the Chrome Experiments site. “We set out to find a way to celebrate the creative, experimental Android work of developers everywhere and inspire more developers to get creative with technology and code,” Google team members posted. A few weeks into the Android experiment it is indeed starting to yield interesting ideas and some new aesthetics surrounding mobile apps.

• Given that users are operating heavy machinery, tweaking a car system interface is a delicate act. As such, Google has made some subtle changes to the Android Auto home screen in the latest update to show “ongoing activities like music and navigation at a glance.” You can now access music playback controls directly from the homescreen — before, you could see which song was playing but needed to go to another screen to pause it. Navigation is also expanded on the home screen to show turning directions without forcing users over to the main app.

• Yet another potentially serious security flaw has been revealed in Android.

• This time the problem involves the mobile operating system’s ability to run more than one app at once – rather than the handling of multimedia messages, which was the crux of a cyber of recent vulnerabilities*.

• BlackBerry’s upcoming device is rumored to use Google’s Android operating system (OS), in what could be the Canadian company’s “last chance” to win in the smartphone market.

• Google, earlier this week revealed the Android 6.0 ‘Marshmallow’ name and released the Android M Developer Preview 3 images for Nexus devices. Until now, Nexus users were the only ones who could experience the new Google Now launcher that ships with latest preview of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Now, non-Nexus users can now also experience the new Google Now launcher on their devices as its apk file has reached the Web.

• After the guessing game that went on for months, Google has finally announced its next Android iteration will be named after the sweet treat Marshmallow. So, now M is for Marshmallow.

• Intel’s RealSense technology is finally ready for prime time after Intel’s Haifa-based Israel team integrated the 3D tech with Google’s Project Tango.

• That guy is a Chicagoan named Kevin Barry. Barry got started doing indie-level Android development while still working for someone else as a software developer during the day. He eventually started making more money with his early Android efforts than he was making with his “real” job — and thus, TeslaCoil Software was born. (Little known fact: TeslaCoil is named after Barry’s cat, Tesla — who was named after a certain Nikola who also bore that name.)

• Google’s making it possible for Android Wear developers to do way more with watch faces starting today. “We’re launching interactive watch faces, making it easier (and more fun) to stay connected, right from your wrist,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Now, with just a tap, your watch face can change its design, reveal more information, or even launch a specific app.” Watch faces can now move back and forth between several screens of data, making them far more useful and lessening the need to enter a watch app. Under Armour’s watch face is already taking advantage of the new functionality; tapping on the screen cycles between your fitness stats (steps, calories burned, etc.) Google has set up a separate section for interactive watch faces within Google Play.

Free Software/Open Source

• Mike Hearn is one of the primary engineers behind bitcoin, the digital currency that aims to remake our financial system. Or at least he used to be. Over the weekend, Hearn told the world that he and a group of other coders were forking the bitcoin project, creating an alternate version of the software that underpins the digital currency.

• “I feel sad that it’s come to this, but there is no other way,” Hearn wrote in an email to others working on the project. “The Bitcoin Core project has drifted so far from the principles myself and many others feel are important that a fork is the only way to fix things.”

• We had the chance to interview Lance Albertson, the director of Open Source Lab (OSL) at Oregon State University (OSU), who is at LinuxCon this year to speak about what they do to help their students bridge this skill gap and how they work with open source projects to train the next generation of people who will keep the Internet running.

• Recognizing the growth of open source software within higher education, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) recently expanded their Affiliate Membership Program to include colleges and universities. Today the OSI announced The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has been approved as the international non-profit’s first Higher Education Affiliate Member. OSI General Manager Patrick Masson said of the news, “The OSI Board of Directors is thrilled USQ stepped forward so quickly upon learning of the Affiliate Program’s expansion to institutions of higher education, and we’re excited to welcome our first univesity.” USQ’s mission, “to enable broad participation in higher education and make significant contributions to research and community development,” not only highlights its ongoing commitment to openness and inclusion, but also aligns with the OSI’s goals in open source awareness, adoption and community development.

• Major Hayden is a man of considerable skill. In addition to his job at Rackspace, he spends time developing open source projects, maintaining packages for Fedora, and making sure icanhazip.com is up and running. He has a stack of certifications and has even gone so far as presenting his resume as a man page. Yet for all his undeniable credentials, he sometimes struggles with a feeling of I don’t belong here.

• Always on the lookout for open source alternatives to pricey commercial offerings, we wondered if open source reporting tools could hold a candle to the established commercial products. For this review we selected the community/open source versions of three commonly used reporting tools, Eclipse BIRT, JasperReports and Pentaho. Our focus was on usability, data access, platform support, report creation and web publishing.

• In fact, despite the ubiquity of open source, most organisations lack knowledge of what open source code they are using, where it is located in their code base, or if it has any known security vulnerabilities. To complicate matters further, there are preconceived notions and differences of opinion between software developers and security professionals about whether open source software is more or less secure than closed-source, or proprietary, alternatives.

• Robin ChaseZipcar co-founder Robin Chase is worried about climate change. If countries don’t strictly follow climate-friendly initiatives, we could see the average temperature rise 7 degrees Celsius by 2060. And today’s solutions may not be enough.

Events

• This week, we kick off the 8th KVM Forum in Seatttle, Washington. With the exception of 2009, KVM Forum has been held every year since 2007, and it’s about more than just KVM — the open source hypervisor that is most often used together with oVirt or the OpenStack cloud computing platform. The conference covers KVM and QEMU (which provides hardware emulation to virtual machines), but it’s also open to talks about all layers in the open source virtualization stack. In particular, this year’s talks will also cover libvirt (virtual machine lifecycle management and a lot more), oVirt (datacenter virtualization), and OpenStack.

• We’d like to remind you that the systemd.conf 2015 Call for Presentations ends on August 31st! Please submit your presentation proposals before that data on our website.

• While the rest of FOSS Nation oooohs and ahhhhs with all the developments currently coming out of LinuxCon in Seattle, the end of the week’s attention — and attendance — shifts to San Marcos, Texas.

• I ended up using FLOSS heavily throughout my web development career, though I have only recently been able to start contributing back to the community. I made my my first commit in 2013 in the form of a Drupal module, after my freelance and startup career came to an unceremonious end.

SaaS/Big Data

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• As you may know, Virtualbox is the most popular, free, cross-platform virtualization software.

Business

• Day one in a new office suite overlooking Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and open-source IT automation startup Ansible has some empty desks.

• While its 50-person local headcount had barely squeezed into its office at the other end of American Tobacco Campus, this new space is three times the size at about 10,000 square feet.

Semi-Open Source

• The hack is revealed in three ways: on Twitter, in a video and on GitHub. It is what it is, and it will let people customise the out-of-the-box watch face.

• Released on GitHub for the open-source community to use and dwell upon, the code uses Dropbox’s Carousel application to load the customised code. Supported faces are hardcoded, and so the Carousel application uses the SupportingHooks script to load Apple Watch faces.

Funding

BSD

• NetBSD, a free, fast, secure, and highly portable UNIX-like open source OS that is able to run on a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices, has been upgraded to version 7.0 RC3.

• RaspBSD debuts, promises ports to more ARM devices real soon now

• We have just activated pre-orders for openbsd 5.8. The release date is oct 18, which seems a long time from now. This is being stretched out to ensure the CD2 production problems happen again.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Guix is the package manager based on Nix and designed exclusively for free software and powering the GNU System. This summer via Google Summer of Code, Guix was ported to GNU Hurd. Guix on Hurd can now build a native final toolchain, build packages natively using the toolchain, and there’s support for cross-building packages for the Hurd.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• Collaboration holds the key to adoption of open source technology in the public sector.

• The ‘age of austerity’ resulting from the recession of the late 00’s has brought cost-cutting to the fore for many companies and institutions in the UK.

• As a result, the IT department has become one of the key aspects of an organisation now under close scrutiny. This effort to save money while improving services has led many authorities in the public sector to make the transition to open source.

Openness/Sharing

• Lytro is making access to its products available to developers and going open source with what it is calling “Lytro Power Tools.” Lytro says the platform was developed to give programmers, researchers and artists complete control at every step – from capture on the camera to post-processing light field data. Initially announced as an Alpha program only available in the United States, LPT Beta is now available to anyone who’s interested.

• Now that eGovernment services are quickly becoming the default way to communicate between public agencies and citizens, citizen participation and engagement are lagging. This is often blamed on the so-called digital divide, i.e. a lack of skills, trust and confidence. The Slovenian Housing Fund, however, found that they could greatly improve the citizen engagement by actively searching for internal rather than external factors and mitigating these.

Open Data

• It’s not a given that an open data initiative will become successful. Only a limited number of datasets are actually used, user support is limited, and the generation of value is seldom demonstrated. A group of researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece and Austria have identified 64 critical success factors for the publication and use of open data. They found, however, that the criticality of these factors depends considerably on the context of the initiative.

Open Hardware

• Open-source furniture company Opendesk has created customised workspace fittings for self-build computer brand Kano…

• A development kit for designing a virtual reality headset for game-players from 0pen-source software has been introduced by the Open-Source Virtual Reality Consortium.

• Chances are pretty good you’ve had a glowing probe clipped to your fingertip or earlobe in some clinic or doctor’s office. If you have, then you’re familiar with pulse oximetry, a cheap and non-invasive test that’s intended to measure how much oxygen your blood is carrying, with the bonus of an accurate count of your pulse rate. You can run down to the local drug store or big box and get a fingertip pulse oximeter for about $25USD, but if you want to learn more about photoplethysmography (PPG), [Rajendra Bhatt]’s open-source pulse oximeter might be a better choice.

• Lytro, the name behind light field photography, has just generously dished out all its tech to everyone, by becoming open source.

• This means anyone can now use the Illum camera and first-gen camera smarts to create anything their imaginations allow. This includes virtual reality capture for 3D viewing on the likes of Google Cardboard or Samsung’s Gear VR headsets.

Programming

• Django Girls is a rapidly growing initiative that aims to bring more women into world of programming. It started a year ago at EuroPython 2014, and since then Django Girls workshops have been held all over the world. In just a year, more than 1,600 women learned about Python and Django during the workshops and many, many more did it at home by reading their open source Django tutorial.

• One of the things that makes Python so powerful is that you can find a module for almost anything. In this article, I cover Astropy, which was originally developed by the Space Telescope Science Institute for doing astronomy calculations like image processing and observatory calculations. Because this is a Python program, you can install it with either pip or easy_install. Your Linux distribution already should have a package included.

• One of my teacher colleagues recently shared his strategies for using Turtle graphics with Python. This piqued my interest (due to my earlier experiences). Since Python is included with most Linux distributions, I was eager to meet my old friend the Turtle.

• To begin, I needed to install Python’s graphical interface, Tkinter. Once I accomplished that, I was ready to begin. I opened a terminal, typed “python,” and pressed Enter.

• At the Python prompt, I typed “import turtle”—and was ready to begin. At the prompt, I typed, “turtle.forward(100)” and pressed Enter. The graphical interface appeared, and the turtle moved 100 turtle steps forward.

• You can use many commands to turn, change the pen color, pick up the pen, change the background color, and more. The Python documentation is very good.

• On Wednesday, Github published a graph tracking the popularity of various programming languages on its eponymous internet service, a tool that lets anyone store, edit, and collaborate on software code. In recent years, Github.com has become the primary means of housing open source software—code that’s freely available to the world at large; an increasing number of businesses are using the service for private code, as well. A look at how the languages that predominate on Github have changed over time is a look at how the software game is evolving.

• Netflix previously released Janitor Monkey and Chaos Monkey as open source, which are cloud tools. The company has also released an open internal tool it built to manage a flood of security alerts and incidents that arrive in tandem. Called FIDO (Fully Integrated Defense Operation), the tool is targeted to triage and categorize threats, as it helps preserve logically ordered incident management.

• A development team is somewhat like a sports team. It’s members each have their own strengths and weaknesses that you have to know and use.

Leftovers

• In response to the New York Times much-read takedown of Amazon’s harsh workplace culture, CEO Jeff Bezos asked employees for stories that might reflect the alleged abusive practices — and one person has taken up his offer.

• Beth Anderson, a spouse of a former Amazon AMZN staff member who worked at the company from 2007 to 2013, wrote a public letter on Quartz, and unfortunately for Bezos, Anderson agrees with much of the details in the NYT story: “Many scenarios and anecdotes detailed in the article hit very close to home,” she wrote.

• Specifically, Anderson takes issue with the constant need for her husband to be at the beck and call of the company. Working in a team that manages shipping warehouse software, Anderson’s husband was expected to respond to his pager within 15 minutes, or face repercussions from his manager: “If something came directly from you, Jeff, it was all hands on deck until that problem got figured out. No matter the emotional or physical toll,” Anderson wrote.

Science

• College was never much of an option for most students in this tiny town of 1,200 located in the woods of the Manistee National Forest. Only 12 of the 32 kids who graduated high school in 2005 enrolled in college. Only two of those have gotten their bachelor’s degree.

Health/Nutrition

• The Cleveland Clinic health center will be getting rid of a McDonald’s franchise after nearly a decade of trying to push the fast-food giant out of its hospital, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

• The renowned US hospital said the move is part of a series of reforms aimed at helping its 44,000 workers and millions of patients make healthier choices.

Security

• Docker developers take the stage at Containercon and discuss their work on future container innovations for security and live migration.

• If you’re using OS X Yosemite, watch out for malware exploiting a new way to take complete control of your Mac.

• Security guru Bruce Schneier says there’s a kind of cold war now being waged in cyberspace, only the trouble is we don’t always know who we’re waging it against.

• Schneier appeared onscreen via Google Hangouts at the LinuxCon/CloudOpen/ContainerCon conference in Seattle on Tuesday to warn attendees that the modern security landscape is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous.

• “We know, on the internet today, that attackers have the advantage,” Schneier said. “A sufficiently funded, skilled, motivated adversary will get in. And we have to figure out how to deal with that.”

• True, “on the Internet today, attackers have the advantage and a motivated attacker will get in, said Schneier. But “Sony had some pretty bad security … I won’t go into details, but they’re embarrassing.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• South Korean military shelled the North’s border area in response to an apparent earlier shelling from the North.

• South Korean military fired dozens of artillery shells across the border on Thursday, the Yonhap news agency reported. The attack came in response to apparent shelling of the southern part of the border area by the North’s military.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• At the height of summer, in this part of North Carolina, the heat can be suffocating. It swells with the humidity, sticks your shirt to your back in seconds. When you lie belly-down on the dry land, every scratch and flicker of grass is a reminder of the life crawling beneath your body: the grasshoppers and mayflies, the ticks and bark lice. She can’t move.

• [...]

• The flytrap only grows wild in one location: a 100-mile range surrounding Wilmington, a city of about 111,000 people, 10 miles from the North Carolina coast.

Finance

• historically, one of the best performers in the stock market over the last decade. But 11 years ago to this day, Google’s IPO was considered a disappointment.

• On August 19, 2004, Google went public with a price of $85 for its roughly 19.6 million shares, which as CNBC’s Bob Pisani noted, was at the low end of expectations. The reason was manifold, starting with Google’s choice to sell their shares through a Dutch auction, where buyers went online to indicate the price and amount of shares they wanted until Google determined a fair price for their shares. As USA Today recounts, this didn’t please those who wanted the option of offering first dips at these shares to their interested clients.

• Wall Street executive Steve Rattner had a column (8/14/15) in the New York Times in which he derided Donald Trump’s economics by minimizing the impact of trade on the labor market. While much of Trump’s economics undoubtedly deserve derision, Rattner is wrong in minimizing the impact that trade has had on the plight of workers.

• GREEK Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has announced his resignation and called for snap elections, as he went on the offensive to defend the country’s massive bailout after it triggered a rebellion within his own party.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Influential Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson — whose show is a frequent destination for Republican presidential candidates — is standing by his plan to make undocumented immigrants “property of the state” if they refuse to leave the country after an allotted period of time. In comments to Media Matters, Mickelson described his plan as “constitutionally defensible, legally defensible, morally defensible, biblically defensible and historically defensible.”

• One hallmark of this year’s political “discourse” (to abuse a term) has been the number of astonishingly angry and ill-informed accusations made by some candidates against their opponents (and others). Nothing unusual about that, sad to say. But what is different is the degree of acceptance, and even approval, exhibited by many voters that in earlier years might have rejected these candidates as well as their statements.

• Labour have been accused of ‘purging’ critical voices from the party after a Labour-supporting blogger was banned from voting in the leadership race, after criticising his local council.

• Lambeth Councillor Alex Bigham sent a dossier to his party recommending that website editor Jason Cobb, be excluded from voting, due to “possible entryism”

• The document, seen by Politics.co.uk, included a series of screen-grabbed tweets in which Cobb accused some Labour councils of “social cleansing” in London as well as a link to a 2010 article he wrote for the Guardian in which he criticised Lambeth council.

Censorship

• Anyone who works for a major news website or publisher knows that social referrals—that is, links that are shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter—have become a crucial source of incoming traffic, and have been vying with search as a source of new readers for some time. Now, according to new numbers from the traffic-analytics service Parse.ly, Facebook is no longer just vying with Google but has overtaken it by a significant amount.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.

• Sprint is getting rid of two-year smartphone contracts, following a move made previously by T-Mobile US and Verizon Wireless.

• “By the end of the year, customers of the No. 4 wireless company will have to pay the full price for their phones or spread the payments out by leasing the device, an option that started last year,” CNBC reported.

• Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure explained the move in an interview with CNBC. Buying a new phone at the subsidized rate of $199 is “a thing of the past, the industry has changed,” he said.

• Interestingly, when zero-rating is squashed, the opposite happens. When the government forbade zero rating in the Netherlands, its largest provider KPN responded by doubling their users’ data caps without a price hike.

• Thus, my suggestion to the Brazil government would be: work with providers to get indiscriminate data bundles to more users, rather than empowering providers to control their users’ Internet usage.

DRM

• Just over half the people who sampled Apple Music have stuck around to use the service regularly, a study by music industry analytics firm MusicWatch has found. Apple recently took a victory lap for hitting the 11 million user mark among people who had sampled its new service, which is meant to compete with similar offerings from Spotify and Pandora. But 48% of those users aren’t there any more.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Rightscorp’s efforts to unmask file-sharers using the DMCA has crashed and burned. After a federal judge ruled in favor of ISP Birch Communications and quashed the anti-piracy firm’s subpoena, Rightscorp appealed the decision. Now the company has backed down, handing the ISP and privacy a big win.

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