● 11.03.15

● Links 3/11/2015: Linux 4.3, OpenELEC 6.0

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

• It is hard to remember that IBM was not exactly sitting on the sidelines when Linux swept over the datacenter in the early 2000s in the wake of the dot-com bust. Big Blue saw the rise of Linux early on, among its supercomputer customers, and it was unsure how to preserve its revenue streams from AIX and OS/400 systems while at the same time embracing Linux. Here we are 15 years later, and it looks like IBM finally has its Linux act together on Power.

• Today I have in my possession several hundred CDs, several hundred more LPs, a few 7″ 45s, a few more cassettes, and a growing number of music downloads.

• I am going to focus on music in digital formats, stored somewhere on a hard drive, whether ripped from CD or purchased as downloads. Moreover, since I am a Linux kind of guy, I’m going to take a Linux kind of perspective on this topic.

• But before I get into the details of digital formats, I’m going to cover some introductory material.

• IBM midrange shops have a distinction and a notoriety for being do-it-yourselfers. They like to invent, construct, and organize according to the individual characteristics of their business environments. They prefer tailor-made to off the rack. That’s why it seems open source development is well suited for the IBM i community. That and the fact that open source allows pilot testing without a purchase approval process. That’s important, too.

• I hope you all rolled your eyes a bit, because although there’s a kernel of truth there, everyone knows it takes a lot more than using Linux to be successful in IT. It takes hard work, planning, strategizing, maintaining and a thousand other things system administrators, developers and other tech folks do on a daily basis. Thankfully, Linux makes that work a little easier and a lot more fun!

Desktop

• It isn’t just Windows and Apple Mac PCs that get new versions of their operating systems, Linux does too. Yesterday Ubuntu 15.10 was released, which saw me immediately downloading the update and installing it.

• Linux is free, which means you can try it out for yourself on an old PC (or a new one if you are brave enough) and not have to worry about breaking the bank.

• If you want to try a Chromebook without spending any money, a free method from Neverware makes this easy.

Server

• IBM introduced several significant new elements for its Linux server stack last month: support for KVM on its z Systems mainframes, Linux-only models in both the z Systems and Power Systems ranges, and a new purchasing model.

• The most technically interesting new development is mainframe support for KVM, the Linux kernel’s built-in hypervisor. Although this is just a new way to access facilities that existing IBM products offer, it may help drive migration of x86 workloads onto IBM’s highest-end kit.

• Big Blue’s big iron already has rich virtualisation offerings. At the lowest level, the PR/SM facility splits each machine’s resources into multiple logical partitions (LPARs), each appearing as a separate machine with a portion of the host’s processing and storage capacity. Even if the machine’s configured as a single unit, it’s really one LPAR.

• In this article, we will address some of the questions we asked in the previous story: Is IaaS or OpenStack right for every enterprise? Are there cases where you don’t need IaaS? How does it affect the cost? What things should you consider before moving to IaaS? What are the tools available?

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has detailed the launch of the Linux 4.3 kernel, a new release with significant security enhancements.

Applications

• The new Kodi 16.0 Alpha 4 has been released today by its developers, and it looks like things are progressing nicely on all fronts.

• As you may know, KKEdit is a text editor combining Mac’s BBEdit, Gedit and Leafpad. While it has interesting features like: jump to function declaration, search and replace via regular expressions, options for saving and restoring sessions, support for multiple bookmarks and source code highlighting, it is not an IDE.

• Pascal Brachet released version 4.5 of Texmaker and I have now updated the Fedora package (for F22 and F23) to this latest version.

• A new feature that is available in this new release is the ability to count the number of words in the open PDF and in the current page (using internal viewer).

• As you may know, Deluge is an open-source, multi-platform, multi-interface (GTK+, web and command-line) BitTorrent client based on libtorrent-rasterbar. The Deluge daemon can run on headless machines with the user-interfaces being able to connect remotely.

• Yet another monthly upstream Armadillo update gets us the first changes to the new the 6.* series. This was preceded by two uploads of test released to GitHub-only. These two were tested both against all reverse-dependencies as usual. A matching upload to Debian will follow shortly.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Valve has published the new Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October, and it looks like the Linux platform is continuing its rise, although it’s still not above 1.0%.

• Voxel Blast certainly caught my interest recently, as it reminds me of some really old 3D space shooter games I played as a teen, and the music is pretty damn cool too.

• With the advent of Linux powered console gaming upon us, we’ve seen a massive increase in games releasing with day-one support for Linux and more and more older games getting Linux ports. What is perhaps more surprising is how prevalent Linux support has become in crowdfunding, and lately we have even seen biggies like The Dwarves, Indivisible and First Wonder go out of their way to provide Linux versions of their games. These are games hinging on tight funding margins, so what is it that makes our small platform worth the extra effort during a busy crowdfunding campaign? We know a couple of key reasons that developers often decide to support Linux even with our small numbers.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Krita contributor Scott Petrovic has released his new book Digital Painting with Krita 2.9. This is the first book on Krita in English! At over 230 pages long, the book is packed with useful information on how Krita works!

• To view analysis results you need to be a member of KDE Coverity project. If you are not yet then please send an appropriate request in Coverity describing your role in KDE and one of KDE Coverity project admins will approve it.

Distributions

• We often get confuse which Linux distribution we are going to use. We think about it a lot. It mainly depends for which purpose you are going to use Linux. Depending on your purpose, you need to select the right Linux Distribution.

New Releases

• The Solus developers have had a very busy week, and they’ve pushed quite a few updates out the door, not to mention the first Release Candidate for the project.

• OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi (XBMC) media player hub, has been upgraded to version 6.0 and is now ready for download.

• Manjaro 15.09 (Bellatrix) is getting a new update, and this is an important one. The developers have finally managed to get the Catalyst drivers working for Linux kernel 4.2.

• If you want to watch media in your living room or bedroom, there are many options nowadays. The easiest, of course, is to buy a box like Roku, Amazon Fire TV or the popular AppleTV. Some “smart” televisions even have this capability built in.

• The more hands-on alternative, however, is to build a HTPC (home theater PC). The problem with that? Windows 10 no longer supports Media Center. While this is a huge pain-point for the HTPC community, the good news is that Linux is — once again — here to save the day. Whether you choose to build a computer, or buy a compatible device like the low-cost Raspberry Pi, the mature OpenELEC Linux distribution will give you an amazing media experience.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• Hundreds of people are trying to install Arch Linux on a machine at the same time in the same terminal, using a voting system to decide the next keypress.

Red Hat Family

• Over the past few weeks, enterprise tech giant Red Hat has made announcements which makes clear the path in which the firm is travelling. The company recently acquired IT automation provider Ansible, as well as announcing membership of the Node.js Foundation as a platinum member, alongside companies such as IBM, Intel, and Microsoft among others.

• The former represents a continued move towards providing DevOps capabilities for its customers, accelerating application development and smoothing out problems for the line of business. The latter is attacking a similar goal through a different method, optimising application throughput for the real-time web.

Fedora

• All the repositories have been updated for Fedora 23, so if you trigger an update, everything should update properly. CUDA enabled programs are still building.

• A few notes:

• HandBrake has been updated to a pre-release of 1.0 for Fedora 23. Updated x264/x265/FFmpeg libraries should give a speed bost to all encoding operations. The Spotify 0.9.x repository has been removed. It will never receive updates anymore, and now the 1.x builds are on feature parity, including 32 bit support. If you haven’t upgraded, just do it now. Nvidia drivers version 358.09 do not yet support X.org driver ABI 20, so you’re probably going to have some lock ups or random issues. The SteamOS and X-Box replacement driver have been updated to the latest upstream.

• Please let me know if you have any upgrade issue.

• Over the last week or two, several folks in the wider FOSS realm have taken the Fedora Project to task, mostly if not entirely on social media, for not releasing Fedora 23 on time.

• Actually, the release of the next Fedora release is on time — tomorrow, if you want to go over to the Fedora Project site and give it a download — but even if it was released “late,” the standard by which a distribution is released on time depends on one thing and one thing only.

• Hi, folks. Just wanted to get an important word out there: if you have a Fedora system running as a FreeIPA server, do NOT upgrade it to Fedora 23 yet! There are several bugs in the upgrade process and you will wind up with a broken server which requires some tricky manual fixing.

• So for now, do not upgrade. Subscribe to this bug to follow progress on fixing the upgrade process.

• After a one week delay, the final release of Fedora 23 should be available tomorrow.

• I have done walk-throughs of the installers for Manjaro, openSuSE, and Ubuntu recently, and I have been looking forward to continuing this with Anaconda, which is by far my favorite of the installers. While the other installers seem to be a simple linear walk through all of the steps which may be required to perform an installation, I think Anaconnda is very nicely designed and engineered to provide a logical view of the necessary tasks and easy access to those which are required, without forcing you to go through every single one whether you really need to or not.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Think Canonical and you’ll think Ubuntu – the free operating system that perhaps doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Sure, it’s barely nibbled at the edges of Windows’ market share on the desktop, and it’s not even flavour of the month among the Linux community any more, but household names such as Amazon, Netflix and Uber have built their cloud businesses on Ubuntu.

• I had mixed feelings from my time with Ubuntu. On the one hand, the distribution feels fairly polished and the installer, applications and system tools all worked well. My desktop’s hardware was properly detected and utilized and this release offers us updated versions of popular software. However, in a virtual machine, Ubuntu performed poorly and this surprised me since the previous release worked quite smoothly in a VirtualBox instance. Not only that, but this version of Ubuntu used quite a bit more memory than the last version did on the same test equipment.

• What really stood out most about Ubuntu 15.10 though was this release felt virtually identical in every way to Ubuntu 15.04 and very similar to 14.10. One of the few changes I noticed was that this version of Ubuntu appears to no longer support both the Upstart and systemd init programs, as the previous version did. I see this as an unfortunate (though expected) change as Canonical moves to support just one init package. On the one hand, this lack of adjustments in 15.10 is good news for people who do not want to experience a lot of change. The development team appears to have been working almost exclusively over the past year to fix bugs and keep things working as they have been. This makes Ubuntu feel like a more stable platform.

• On the other hand, having a platform that does not boast any new features makes me wonder if there is a point to pushing out a new release. The minor package updates presented probably could have been handled by a backports repository for Ubuntu 15.04. While projects like openSUSE and Fedora are experimenting with new system admin tools, file system snapshots, Wayland and boot environments, Ubuntu appears to be sitting idle. I know there are behind-the-scenes changes planned (such as Snappy packages, Mir and a new version of Unity), but those items keep getting pushed back. In short, I feel this release of Ubuntu was good, but it isn’t bringing anything new to the table over the previous version.

Devices/Embedded

• Mentor Automotive has launched a Linux-based, GENIVI compliant “Connected OS” that improves upon its ATP automotive stack with ADAS, eAVB, and CE support.

• The Mentor Automotive division of Mentor Graphics announced the availability of a Mentor Automotive Connected OS stack that appears to replace its Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP), moving beyond in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) to add support for driver information, consumer electronics device integration, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) functionality, among other features. Like ATP, Connected OS is said to be compliant with the open source GENIVI automotive spec, and run on Linux. Connected OS is supported with AXSB hardware reference platform.

• They say the first step of coming to terms with addiction is admitting you have a problem… I have a problem with collecting ARM devices… there I said it! How big is this problem you ask? How about I list them out and let you decide!

Phones

Tizen

• The Samsung Z3, the companies second Tizen smartphone, has been released In India and will be coming to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka soon. Previously we reported on the Z3 coming to Europe and today, according to Insiders, there are 11 European countries that the Z3 is currently being tested for launch in.

Android

• Facebook’s chief product officer is reportedly requiring a number of team members to switch from iPhones to Android phones so they can experience how most people interact with the social network.

• An earlier report by Matt Weinberger of Business Insider UK noted that Sony had initially offered Craig $5 million to carry around its Xperia Z4 phone in the movie.

• Discussions involved an $18 million marketing commitment from Sony, escalating to a $50 million marketing and promotional package from Samsung as well as a $5 million product placement for Bond to be seen using an Android phone with Samsung’s brand on it.

• There’s never been a better time to buy an Android smartphone. Not only is there a huge array of different handsets from a multitude of manufacturers to choose from, but what you get for your money is simply incredible.

• 2015 was (and still continues to be) the year of innovation in mobile technology. Android phones as well as iPhones and Windows Phones have advanced to another level, one which some expected, others didn’t. We got releases that blew our minds this year, as well as devices that aren’t as impressive as others. Some companies failed to get out of the rut they were in while others made huge progress in the industry. IoT got a big boost this year and mobile development is headed for new frontiers. Windows 10 has introduced universal Windows apps and Android will be doing the same – as soon as it becomes a cross-platform OS like Google recently announced.

• Once the mobile maker to beat, BlackBerry is fighting for survival. Its secret weapon: the first-ever BlackBerry phone powered by Google’s Android software.

• It’s still unclear what form this new operating system would take. Would it look like Chrome OS with access to the Google Play Store? Or will it look more like Android does now, but redesigned to look and work like a desktop operating system?

Free Software/Open Source

• Where do the developers in my FOSS community live? For large open source communities where personal contact with developers is impossible, answering this simple question may be difficult.

• In some projects, developers have the option of registering personal geographical information such as a country or city of residence or GPS coordinates. For example, this is the case with Debian (shown below). In other projects, IP addresses—on which geolocation analysis can be performed later—are collected. This information permits tracking different kinds of access (to the development repositories, to the download area, to the forums, etc). But most projects don’t have these tracking capabilities.

• In a move that Pivotal says will make massively scalable, high-performance big data processing much more accessible, the company has turned its Greenplum data analytics platform into an open source product.

• If you attend LISA15 in Washington D.C. this month, you’ll want to catch James Mickens’ closing keynote, It Was Never Going to Work, So Let’s Have Some Tea. James Mickens has a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, and he is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. In the past, he worked in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research. And he’s hilarious.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Crown Commercial Service has announced a new Open Source desktop suite as an alternative to Microsoft.

• The new offering, Collabora GovOffice is based on LibreOffice from vendor Collabora Productivity, and is compatible with Google Docs and Microsoft Office (including Office 365).

CMS

IoT

• The world of smart devices talking to each other—and to us—is well underway and here to stay. To connect to the Internet of Things opportunity, it’s key to design and build networking infrastructures that can handle massive amounts of new data. Read more in this whitepaper.

• Devices are being connected to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) at an increasingly rapid rate — this we already know to be true.

Business

Semi-Open Source//Openwashing

• Netflix is taking steps to make its collaboration with open source developers easier by overhauling the Netflix Open Source program. Among other changes, the company will now release open products as Docker containers to simplify access.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Hi!

• Please see .

• Text-only version:

• GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, GNU MIG 1.6 released.

• We’re pleased to announce new releases!

• GNU Hurd 0.7, NEWS:

• Version 0.7 (2015-10-31)

Public Services/Government

• The European Parliament calls upon the Commission “for the systematic replacement of proprietary software by auditable and verifiable open-source software in all the EU institutions, and for the introduction of a mandatory open-source-selection criterion in all future ICT procurement procedures”.

• The association of Italian municipalities (ANCI) is working on an interoperability manifesto to improve the information exchange between public administrations. The association is proposing standards and guidelines to make computer systems and database systems able talk to one another.

Openness/Sharing

• Wikipedia is one of the great success stories of the Information Age: a free, open-source encyclopedia with over 37 million articles in 250 languages, all compiled by anonymous volunteer editors. There are no managers, no pay, and anyone can be an editor. It is one of the first results on any search engine and is the most common source of information for anyone first learning about a topic. These topics are generally objective and educational, and Wikipedia reports that its reliability rating approaches the Encyclopedia Britannica. While systemic bias admittedly exists on Wikipedia, it is supposedly limited to a few minor articles.

Open Hardware

• One of the many advantages of inventing something is that you get to name it. Even better if your name and the thing you have created have some sort of phonetic connection – it just seems right then that the creators of an entirely 3D printed violin, Matt and Kaitlyn Hova, combined their name with their instrument and have released the Hovalin.

Programming

• The R Consortium and the Linux Foundation are investing in a new code-hosting platform that will help streamline the development and distribution of software packages for R, the popular statistical programming language.

Leftovers

• Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has said new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a “conviction politician” like Margaret Thatcher was.

• He said anti-austerity and anti-war MP Mr Corbyn is someone viewed as extreme but who could shift the political scenery like the former Conservative prime minister.

• Speaking to Sky News, Mr Varoufakis admitted he was “one of those strange left-wingers who missed” the late Tory leader.

Security

• For some time infosec pros have known that plugins for WordPress, Joomla and other content management systems are being leveraged by attackers.

• More evidence of that has come in a report from Akamai’s Security Intelligence Research Team (SIRT), which discovered a widely distributed botnet that leverages CMS systems to launch co-ordinated brute-force spamming campaigns.

• How do you get high-end security-monitoring skills without the high-end price? Industrial giant BlueScope recently found out after its CSO worked with a key service provider to build a robust, global security operations centre (SOC) using open-source components.

• Over 14,000 keys used to unlock files encrypted by CoinVault and Bitcryptor have been released, signaling the death of the ransomware variants.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Climate change may have many economic impacts, including loss of crops, changes in water supply, increased incidence of natural disaster, and spikes in health care costs related to infectious diseases and temperature-related illnesses. However, hard evidence about the effects of climate change on economic activity has been inconsistent.

• A new paper published in Nature takes on the ambitious task of connecting micro- and macro-level estimates of climate costs. The study finds that climate change can be expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23 percent by the year 2100. This study is important because it solves a problem that has existed in prior models of climate change effects on economics: discrepancies between macro- and micro-level observations. This study presents the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled in some way to global climate. The study also sets up a new empirical paradigm for modeling economic loss in response to climate change.

• Climate change deniers should come to Ghana

• Freed from the physical reality that places the United States in the temperate zone of a tilted planet, Schrager is free to reorganize regional schedules in the name of “economic efficiency” without regard to what this would actually do to people’s lives. She wisely declines to describe the results of her scheme, maybe realizing that the idea of putting the West Coast permanently on what is now Central Standard Time would have limited appeal had she spelled out that in mid-December, the Sun would set at 2:43 pm in Los Angeles, 2:27 pm in Portland and 2:18 pm in Seattle.

• Reverse mortgage pitchman and former Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) passed away on November 1, 2015, at the age of 73, but his legacy of giving the Koch Brothers a pass on one of their first major forays into funneling money into mysterious groups to try to win elections continues unabated.

Finance

• Millions face ever deeper income and wealth inequalities, ecological dangers, politics corrupted by money.

Privacy

• Internet and social media companies will be banned from putting customer communications beyond their own reach under new laws to be unveiled on Wednesday.

• Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

• Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.

• Pending before federal magistrate judge James Orenstein is the government’s request for an order obligating Apple, Inc. to unlock an iPhone and thereby assist prosecutors in decrypting data the government has seized and is authorized to search pursuant to a warrant. In an order questioning the government’s purported legal basis for this request, the All Writs Act of 1789 (AWA), Judge Orenstein asked Apple for a brief informing the court whether the request would be technically feasible and/or burdensome. After Apple filed, the court asked it to file a brief discussing whether the government had legal grounds under the AWA to compel Apple’s assistance. Apple filed that brief and the government filed a reply brief last week in the lead-up to a hearing this morning.

• Hopefully, it won’t take a lot of convincing for folks to understand just how wrong-headed this is. For starters, if the plaintiffs are correct, they are currently being subjected to unconstitutional government surveillance for which they are entitled to a remedy. The fact that this surveillance has a limited shelf-life (and/or that Congress was complicit in it) doesn’t in any way ameliorate the constitutional violation — which is exactly why the Supreme Court has, for generations, recognized an exception to mootness doctrine for constitutional violations that, owing to their short duration, are “capable of repetition, yet evading review.” Indeed, in this very same opinion, the Second Circuit first held that the ACLU’s challenge isn’t moot, only to then invokes mootness-like principles to justify not resolving the constitutional claim. It can’t be both; either the constitutional challenge is moot, or it isn’t.

Intellectual Monopolies

• On October 23, the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines Regulating Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights(Draft for Comments) were made available to USITO by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) for review and comment.

• The five-part draft provides guidance on how to regulate IPR-related monopoly agreements, abuse of market dominant position, monopoly involving standards-essential patents, and concentration of undertakings.

Copyrights

• Is there copyright in very short phrases?

• As copyright enthusiasts know, this invariably proves to be one of the thorniest issues to determine when it comes to specific cases. Just a couple of days ago it was reported that Taylor Swift has been sued for copyright infringement over inclusion of ‘haters gone hate’ and ‘playas gone play’ in her song Shake It Off.

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