● 12.25.15

● Links 25/12/2015: SolydXK Linux Christmas Release, Wine 1.9

Posted in News Roundup at 5:25 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Today in Linux news, Joel Lee identified 5 flaws in Linux that “need fixing.” Some of them sound more like features to me. Elsewhere, the Fedora election results are in and Jamie Watson was pleasantly surprised by SparkyLinux Enlightenment. Michael Larabel laments the biggest disappointments of the year and Maximum PC has a review of Alienware’s Steam Machine.

• It takes a long toolchain to take the garage-machinist-to-be through all the hoops needed to start cranking out parts. From the choice of CAD software to the CAM tools that turn 3D models into gcode, to the gcode interpretters that chew up this source code and spit out step and direction pulses to turn the cranks of a cnc mill, there’s a multitude of open-and-closed source tools to choose from and even an opportunity to develop some of our own. That’s exactly what [Nick] and the folks over on the cnc-club forums did; they’ve written their own CAM tool that enables the end user to design a procedure of cuts and toolpaths that can export to gcode compatible with LinuxCNC.

• While this year there were many great achievements in the Linux/open-source space with a ton of new innovations, exciting free software project releases, and much more (I’ll have a recap of the best of 2015 in the days ahead), there were sadly many things that didn’t pan out or materialize this year. Here’s a look at the open-source and Linux letdowns of 2015.

Desktop

• Are these problems inherent to Linux’s design? Or can they be overcome with proper direction and collaboration? It’s hard to say, but let’s take a look and see what could go right.

• I moved away from windows years ago, and recently, and reluctantly decided to dual boot along side Ubuntu, and heres why I am ready to smash up the HDD with windows installed.

• I went from someone who loved windows, back from 98 to XP, then tolerated it along side linux, eventually phased it out of my life, and now wish it would burn and go to hell.

• Consequently what I believe is that no matter Microsoft’s original intentions (that the ‘free offer’ was genuinely for one year or a smoke and mirrors trick to encourage adoption) the scenario has now changed because of one thing: Adoption Rates. Right now Microsoft is missing them.

• Supersite for Windows breaks the numbers down in detail, but in a nutshell Microsoft currently has little to no chance of reaching its target of having Windows 10 installed on one billion PCs within “2 to 3 years” of release.

• At it stands at the time of publication, Windows 10 has been installed on 110m PCs and roughly one million more are being upgraded each day. Amazing as that figure sounds, it’s bad news for Microsoft as Supersite for Windows explains the operating system was doing 2.5m installs per day in its first month of release and 1.6m installs per day by the end of October.

Kernel Space

• Blockchain is a digital ledger that can be used to create secure, cost-efficient business networks that do not require a centralised point of control.

• Speaking to Wired, Linux Foundation head Jim Zemlin defrayed possible discussion about a “proprietary” blockchain for the “majors”, emphasising that Open Ledger – which the same report mentions may end up being named “Hyperledger” – is designed not only to be more flexible and instance-based but also is meant to collaborate with other blockchain infrastructures, commenting “We have a lot of confidence in this process”.

Graphics Stack

• While I’ve been writing a lot the past few days about the AMDGPU kernel driver given it’s landing PowerPlay support for Linux 4.5, I took some time today for running some Radeon (non-AMDGPU) DRM tests to see if the performance of this DRM-next code has changed compared to Linux 4.4 near-final.

• The graphics cards used in this comparison were limited to those supported by the Radeon DRM driver at the end of 2014. Back then, the AMDGPU driver was not public so cards like the R9 285 Tonga were unsupported. Even back then, the Radeon R9 290 on Ubuntu 14.10 was just running LLVMpipe. So for this comparison I tested just the Radeon R7 370, Radeon HD 6870, and Radeon HD 6950 for both R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D coverage.

• A few days ago Intel landed OpenGL tessellation support in their open-source driver as required by OpenGL 4. However, this initial implementation was limited to support Intel’s Broadwell hardware and newer. With new patches, that is now changing.

• Complementing yesterday’s AMDGPU tests with the new DRM-Next code that has PowerPlay support where the speed of this latest open-source driver code was compared to the proprietary driver, here are some tests showing the AMDGPU driver performance under a few different scenarios.

Applications

• The nice guys from RasPlex have forked the abandoned Plex Home Theater into OpenPHT (github, Plex forum) and updated it with several improvements. Plex itself is now developing a new player called Plex Media Player, which unfortunately uses closed source components. I tried to build also the Plex Media Player for Debian, but a hitherto unreleased Qt versions is necessary, so I gave up for now. So here is a new built of OpenPHT for Debian/sid and jessie, amd64 and i386. This new package conflicts with the old plexhometheater.

• At my day job we deal with a lot of incoming data for our product, which requires us to be able to calculate histograms and other statistics on the data-stream as fast as possible.

• If you are a user of GNOME’s Totem video player, it looks like video hardware acceleration via the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is working out better for users if using the new GStreamer-VAAPI v0.7 release.

• With noticing a new dark theme for GIMP having been added yesterday to GIMP Git, it reminded me I’ve been meaning to try out the latest state of GIMP 2.9 myself. This morning I proceeded to work on building GIMP 2.9 from Git on an Ubuntu 15.10 system… There’s more dependencies to deal with than GIMP 2.8. Once switching over to the Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) package archive, most of those dependencies could be easily satisfied. However, the GEGL in Ubuntu Xenial was too old for GIMP 2.9 Git. Additionally, libmypaint-gegl wasn’t packaged for Ubuntu.

• The developers behind darktable, an open source and cross-platform RAW image editor designed for GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as various UNIX-like platforms, such as BSD and Mac OS X, were very proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of darktable 2.0.

• I’m pleased to announce the release of NetworkManager 1.0.10, the latest stable release in the 1.0.x series. As usual, we recommend that users of 1.0.x series as well as users of older 0.9.10.x series upgrade to this release which is D-Bus and C API backwards compatible.

• The building blocks matter. It’s like the alphabet – if you know the letters well you can build on top of those. There are complex utilities and there are needs for those. However, the building blocks form the base and are of extreme importance.

• TigerVNC, the high performance VNC server/client backed by Red Hat and others, has released version 1.6.0 to end out the year.

• TigerVNC 1.6 isn’t too much of a feature release, but admittedly is “mostly about fixing various bugs and polishing existing features.”

• As you may know, Delaboratory is a “color correction utility”, inspired by Gimp and RawTherapee.

• Typhoon is an open-source weather application, forked from Stormcloud 1.1, which is not available for free. It permits the users to change the colors to integrate better with the system wallpaper and theme and adjust the application’s opacity.

• As you already know, Wireshark is an open-source protocol analyzer software, very used for monitoring the network traffic.

• The latest SunFlower builds are available via some third party PPA, so installing the software on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17.x, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya and other Ubuntu derivative systems, so installing the software is easy.

• CherryTree is a text editor, with the features of a modern editor, such as syntax highlighting, spell check, export to html, password protection, and many others.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.9.0 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): - A number of fixes that were deferred during code freeze. - WSAPoll implementation. - Standard font dialog fixes. - X11 drag&drop improvements. - Various bug fixes.

• With Wine 1.8 having been released last week, Wine 1.9.0 was released today as the first development snapshot leading to the Wine 1.10 release in 2016.

• The Wine developers have just revealed the new 1.9 development version of the Wine is now available for download, marking the launch of a new branch.

Games

• About 10 years ago I discovered Linux for the first time. I had an old laptop at that time and was trying really hard to make it work. So I tried Suse. I was able to finally use that piece of blessed junk to browse the web, compile some #C and play SuperTuxCart. I’ve loved Linux since then.

• Divinity: Original Sin no colon Enhanced Edition is now out on Mac, Linux, and that newfangled SteamOS, meaning you can play it on that fancy Steam Box your mum’s getting you for Christmas. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. Oops. Here, let me distract you with the news that Larian have updated the PC game so it’s “in synch with the Mac & Linux version”, oh and they’ve also “fixed a number of stability issues reported by players”. That certainly sounds like a sensible thing to be doing.

• We announced back in February that the developers of Republique were working on a Linux port, but needed some middleware to add Linux support. However it seems like this never happened, and the efforts to bring the game to Linux have been abandoned.

• We’ve been looking forward to Valve’s Steam Machine initiative for a long time, mostly because Valve has never really failed us in the past. Well, there’s a first time for everything, and unfortunately, we have to acknowledge that Valve has made a misstep here.

• Developer WayForward has been developing games for consoles for well over a decade, and have now released their first game for Linux on Steam. Many will know them for their remaster of Capcom classic DuckTales, and for their own IPs Mighty Switch Force! and Shantae. Mighty Switch Force! Academy appear to be their first game developed with third-party game engine GameMaker: Studio, however, so this release doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll see more of their older games on Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• For those who are new to the project, sway is an i3-compatible Wayland compositor. That is, your existing i3 configuration file will work as-is on sway, and your keybindings will be the same and the colors and font configuration will be the same, and so on. It’s i3, but on Wayland.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This new release builds upon the new technical foundations we put into place and published to the public for the first time with our previous beta. We have been listening to user feedback and fixed the bugs they found. We would like to thank David Faure and Matija Šuklje who have been instrumental in finding quirks, providing feedback and supporting us. Thanks guys, it is really appreciated!

• This gift is for all KDE Community, for all support that you give to us since Octuber. For accept us inside this community. To allows us to evolve like humans and programmers.

• There’s a whole mess of updates in the area51 repository maintained by the KDE-FreeBSD team.

• I love Krita because it is professional in the look and feel but it is for free. I also like the large amount of digital painting brushes in Krita.

• After quite a few false starts, I came upon a tutorial by Seth Kenlon in which he explains how to use masking in Kdenlive. Thanks to Seth’s article, you can learn how to open one (1) window using masking techniques. This set me on the right track, but combining more than two clips requires one more ingredient that you’ll learn about later.

• as you wanted to have a mail with all my concerns about client-side-window-decorations (CSD), here is a very long mail presenting all my concerns what will not be possible any more with CSD and why I think that these particular features will be impossible. The list is based on KWin’s current feature set.

• Over the past few weeks, I have been participating in the Google Code-in, which has been a blast. For those who aren’t familiar, the idea for the code-in came from the Google Summer of Code, which is for college students. They wanted to create one for high schoolers, with less commitment. To do this they created the task-based code-in.

Distributions

Reviews

• In summary, I would say that I have been very pleasantly surprised by Sparky Linux Enlightenment in the short time I have been using it. It was easier to install than I expected, especially on my UEFI firmware systems. I expected to struggle to figure out the Enlightenment desktop, at least at first, and I have to say honestly that so far I have found it to be very easy to use.

New Releases

• The developers behind the antiX MX GNU/Linux distribution have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the antiX MX-15 computer operating system.

• On Christmas Eve, Arjen Balfoort from the SolydXK project announced the immediate availability for download of new builds for the SolydX and SolydK GNU/Linux distributions.

• As you may know, Plop Linux is a free and open-source operating system built from scratch, specially created for retrieving data from damaged hard drivers. Plop Linux system is small and can boot from CD/DVD/USB Flash Driver or network with PXE.

Arch Family

• The Manjaro Community Team, through Regards Holmes, was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Manjaro Linux JWM Edition 15.12 computer operating system.

• As you may know, Deepin Linux is a free and open-source Debian-derivative (former Ubuntu-derivative) system that uses a beautiful desktop environment called Deepin.

Ballnux/SUSE

• Significant updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, the enterprise open source operating system, arrived this week with the release of the first service pack for the platform.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 appeared earlier this fall. It introduced a range of new features, such as live kernel patching and full system rollback, to SUSE’s commercial OS.

Slackware Family

• It took me a while to get to a level where I could do another public update of my “liveslak” scripts for the Slackware Live Edition. The previous two articles about the Live OS generated quite some feedback and I think I was able to address a lot of those remarks and suggestions in the updated code. My TODO has however only shrunk with one item…

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) EVP Arun Oberoi sold 9,300 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction on Tuesday, December 22nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $80.81, for a total transaction of $751,533.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 52,616 shares in the company, valued at approximately $4,251,898.96. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website.

• Since reaching a low of $67.01 in August, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company has seen its stock surge some 22%, including a 12% increase in the past three months. With RHT shares now trading at around $82, investors who have held RHT stock since the start of 2015 have gained some 18% (RHT shares closed at $69.14 last Dec. 31), compared to a decline of 0.11% in the S&P 500 index. All told, Red Hat — having beaten earnings in all four reporting periods in 2015 — was red hot, as we predicted this time last year it would be.

Fedora

• The Fedora developers have decided to adopt GCC 6 for Fedora 24, but this means that a lot of packages need to be recompiled.

• Probably all the Linux systems are released with a set of default wallpapers. For example, Canonical organizes a contest for each release, permitting the users to submit wallpapers.

• Fedora’s leadership structure is a mix of appointed and elected positions, with many of the appointed ones selected by other project members active in a particular area. For example, on the top-level Fedora Council, we have two roles filled by general election, while the Engineering Lead is selected by FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) and the Project Outreach Lead by FAmSCo (the Fedora Ambassador’s Steering Committee). And, both FESCo and FAmSCo consist entirely of elected positions.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The release candidate is out on Christmas Eve for Deepin 15, a Linux distribution that continues to strive for a simple and clean experience that makes it easy for all users.

• Deepin 15 is adding new system sound effects, is based on the latest Sid packages, Qt is powering the desktop to replace their previous HTML5+WebKit usage, Mutter is used as the window manager, the Linux 4.2 kernel is used, systemd is used rather than Upstart, Bash is now the default shell rather than Zsh, GCC 5.3.1 is the base compiler, there is lower memory use, and many other changes. It’s interesting they switched from an Ubuntu based back to a Debian Sid upstream, likewise, the desktop work they’re now doing in Qt is interesting. Details and screenshots of their former HTML5 desktop can be found via this article from last year.

• Distribution that I feel fond of their work on UX for Linux ecosystem has switched from Ubuntu to Debian. So now pabs will probably invite them to our Derivate Census and they start packaging their stack into Debian directly.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A new and refreshed Ubuntu MATE 15.10.1 image has been released for the Raspberry Pi 2 platform, bringing a number of changes and improvements.

• Did you know that more than half of OpenStack cloud deployments are built on Ubuntu Linux? Did you know that Linux powers many of the fastest supercomputers? The fact is, the influence of Linux extends far beyond the day-to-day tasks of average desktop users.

• The Ubuntu developers are finally working on a new feature called Aethercast for Ubuntu phones, which is a way to connect to the Miracast protocol.

• Aethercast is a new Canonical-led project for enabling wireless display support on Ubuntu.

• Aethercast is implementing Miracast support, the standard from the WiFi Alliance for providing roughly “HDMI over WiFi” by being able to wireless cast a display using WiFi Direct. Miracast has long been supported by Android and the other major mobile phone platforms while it’s still being worked on for the Ubuntu Phone space.

• If a new Mir release was on your Christmas wishlist (like it was on mine), Mir 0.18 has been released! I’ve been working on this the last few days, and its out the door now. Full text of changelog. Special thanks to mir team members who helped with testing, and the devs in #ubuntu-ci-eng for helping move the release along.

• Dustin Kirkland, which is the leader of the Ubuntu Product and Strategy team has announced that probably more than 1 billion users use Ubuntu, if we count everybody that uses Ubuntu, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu server or other versions of the operating system.

• As a reminder, Raspberry Pi 2 is a credit card-sized ARM singleboard computer, ideal for creating DIY (Do It Yourself) project or learning programming and electronics.

• Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker is a spin off from the Raspberry Pi 2 initiative for Ubuntu MATE The basic idea is simple; make as many Ubuntu flavours for the Raspberry Pi 2 we can.

Flavours and Variants

• Roberto J. Dohnert from Black Lab Software informs us today about the general availability of the Linux Kernel 4.3.3 Kernel Enablement Kit for Black Lab Linux, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint operating systems.

• The developers of the Deepin Linux operating system were happy to announce today, December 24, the immediate availability for download and testing of the RC (Release Candidate) build of Deepin 15.

• Today, December 24, just in time for Christmas, Manjaro Linux developer Bernhard Landauer was very proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the first stable version of the Manjaro Linux Deepin Edition.

• Roberto J. Dohnert from Black Lab Software has announced the immediate availability of Linux Kernel 4.3.3 Enablement Kit, which permits regular users to easily install Kernel 4.3.3 on Black Lab Linux and other Ubuntu-based systems, like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Deepin or Ubuntu itself.

Devices/Embedded

• Arrow’s “SF2+” IoT development kit combines an Emcraft COM based on Microsemi’s Cortex-M3/FPGA “SmarFusion2” SoC with a carrier board, and runs uClinux.

• The Arrow Electronics SF2+ Development Kit, which targets security camera, communications, connected home, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, is unusual in that it pairs the stripped down uClinux and U-boot with a Microsemi SmartFusion2 (SF2) SoC. The Microsemi SoC combines an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller core with an FPGA, which is said to enable capabilities like image processing, I/O expansion, bridging, and security.

• At last, the PowerVR Graphics SDK v4.0 is live! Featuring an all-new Framework and a host of improvements to our existing utilities, v4.0 is one of our biggest releases to date.

• We didn’t let it get us down after our server hiccuped and lost our active poll results last week. We just turned around and put up another poll. Unfortunately, our rebooting-the-reboot poll (we were only three polls into a reboot of polling on FOSS Force after an absence of a year or more) wasn’t as popular with our visitors as the two we lost, but hey, that’s life.

Phones

• Lay-offs of 70 employees at Jolla have all been canceled, and Jolla is currently recruiting back their key resources. The aim is to continue with about half of the amount of Sailors compared to the situation before the lay-offs.

Android

• Ad blocking is something of a contentious issue, but it’s one that has been brought to prominence in 2015. The adblockalypse arrived this year as the debate about whether disabling ad blockers was preferable to paying for content.

• Adblock Plus — one of the best known ad blockers out there — recently updated its acceptable ads policy which gives people the option of permitting certain ads to appear in their browser. But a new deal struck with ASUS means that anyone buying a phone or tablet from the Taiwanese company in 2016 will find that ad blocking is baked in and enabled by default.

• In an interview with Motherboard, AdBlock Plus’s cofounder and CEO, Till Faida revealed that his company was working with ASUS to bring ad blocking to the hardware manufacturer’s stock browser. More than this, ad blocking will be switched on by default, undoubtedly to chagrin of advertisers the world over.

• As you may know, Kodi (previously named XBMC) is a famous open source media hub and home theater PC, being translated in more than 30 languages. Also, its features can be highly extended via third party plugins and extensions and has support for PVR (personal video recorder).

• There’s nothing quite like getting a new phone or tablet as a gift, especially if it’s replacing something broken or it’s your very first phone or tablet. After the thank you’s and hugs have been exchanged, it’s time to pull that shiny new gadget out of the box and get to know all of the buttons and sounds that you’re probably going to be touching and hearing for the foreseeable future.

• Android app developers were busy in 2015, delivering a cavalcade of clever phone and tablet apps to help boost productivity, launch a startup, stay safe and keep you from getting bored while you’re waiting to board your plane.

• Tony Trummer focuses on how to apply an adversarial perspective when building Android applications, how to identify attack surfaces and the thought process attackers use.

• A while back, a class action lawsuit was initiated against Apple, claiming that Apple’s iMessage app caught messages on their way from iDevices to Android devices and blocked them from being sent. The suit was brought on by a few disgruntled ex-owners of iPhones. They claimed that, after switching to Android in 2012, messages sent by their iPhone-toting friends were not reaching them. Some Android owners found this issue so inconvenient that they simply went back to iOS. Apple issued a fix for the error in November of 2014 after hearing complaints from a great number of users that switched from iOS to Android. After two years, a major bug had finally been squashed, leaving many users wondering what took so long.

• People upgrade their smartphone — on average — once every two years. And every time, you’re faced with the same question: What to do with the old device? Bin it? Sell it? Give it to a friend?

• As it happens, there are a number of creative uses for an old Android smartphone, that can make your life — and the lives of others — far easier. And these require little to no investment on your part.

• So, check out 15 things you can to do with your old Android smartphone…

• For many admins, Belarc’s Security Adviser is the go-to tool for information gathering on a Windows desktop system. Now, you can reach for Belarc Security Advisor on the Android platform.

• Many were hoping that Android Wear would signal the true start of the smartwatch revolution, and while Google’s effort is easily the best we’ve seen so far in this particular field, there are issues that could prevent it from catching on in the way some have predicted.

Free Software/Open Source

• The good thing about open source office tools: you can use them to save major cost in office productivity. As you’ll see on the list below, some of these free office tools replace highly expensive commercial software. In some cases, a business could equip itself for thousands of dollars less.

• In many ways, the following list of open source office tools shows just how far open source has progressed in the last several years. And, always, if you have recommendations to add to this list, use the Comments section below. Happy downloading!

• Arguably, the open source movement — the idea that a group of technologists freely contributing their own work and commenting on the work of others, can create a final product that is comparable with anything that a commercial enterprise might create — has been one of the great innovation catalysts of the technology industry.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• For Mozilla, 2015 has been a year of large challenges, with a shift in funding sources and increasing competitive pressures across the desktop and mobile markets. The biggest challenges for Mozilla, however, are likely yet to come in 2016.

• We mentioned earlier that Mozilla’s Firefox os isn’t dead. Mozilla has some great plans for firefox os. These internal documents obtained by Hypertext shows the future of Mozilla Firefox preparing detailed OS beyond smartphones and include Panasonic TVs & these documents detail the new plans of Mozilla.

• It’s been some time since the last Servo article on the OSG blog, but this has no relation to the speed at which the browser engine’s development has been progressing.

• In the last post, the Offscreen Rendering (OSR) integration status was explored, culminating in both some code snippets as well as videos of an embedded browser application. That post can be considered the foundation for the recently-tweeted screenshot of Servo running with Wayland support.

• A lot is going on at Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox web browser. In the next 12 months, the organization plans to make fundamental changes to the Firefox web browser which affect core features of the browser including its add-on ecosystem.

• I said good-bye to my FirefoxOS phone because of Mozilla’s decision to stop the distribution of the devices.

• It was on the news this mroing, Mozilla will stop developing FirefoxOS phones, and the top Hacker News comment really resonated with me. Sure, IoT is the future, and it would be great if we had more nifty stuff there (shameless IoT privacy plug), but these headlines make the bad taste that I’ve had in my mouth ever since Mozilla shuttered Persona stronger, and I can’t stay silent any more.

• Andy McKay, Engineering Manager at Mozilla, announced yesterday on the official add-ons blog that Mozilla would implement temporary add-on loading in its Firefox web browser.

CMS

• WordPress.com has been rewritten from scratch in what is said to be the platform’s biggest update ever.

• Not to be confused with the self-installed version of WordPress, WordPress.com is the fully hosted version of the content management system.

BSD

• First things first: I know that the wide number of variants in the BSD family are primarily aimed at servers. That said, it’s clearly understandable that with the exception of PC-BSD and BSD variants like GhostBSD, desktop/laptop users are not the primary focus in the BSD constellation. I get that, and regardless I am still using it for about 80 percent of my overall computing needs, and still using it on a daily basis on my go-to daily laptop.

• Linux server distributions get compared all the time. And in the end, the discussion typically ends up around CentOS (from RHEL) and Ubuntu (from Debian). Why is this? When Rackspace discusses Linux server options, many more distributions are mentioned: Gentoo, Arch, Fedora, etc. Let’s focus on Gentoo and Arch.

• While we primarily focus on Linux operating system news and releases, I do enjoy watching the *BSD space and covering their major events. This year has saw some great updates for DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, and friends. Here’s a look at the most popular BSD news on Phoronix for 2015.

• For my part, I’m not a fan of systemd but I also don’t think it’s the end of the world. I watched a great interview with Lennart on the Linux Action Showabout why he implemented it, and he had some good reasons. To write a daemon for Linux, you need to maintain a different init script for each distro because they all put things in different places. And sysVinit isn’t the best with dependencies. Developing things for the Linux desktop is not as easy as it could be, due in large part to the fragmentation.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Just a few days ago I was writing about LLVM working on PKU memory protection keys. It seems now GCC has support for Intel’s PKU instructions.

• PKU Memory Protection Keys are going to be a feature of future Intel CPUs as explained in the aforelinked article and with them come new PDPKRU and WRPKRU instructions. With this commit today to the mainline GNU Compiler Collection, it appears GCC has now support for these new PKU instructions.

• Over a year ago now, I went looking for the best plugins to turn Vim into a full-fledged IDE. Interestingly, a lot of the comments on that post were about how Emacs already has most of these plugins built in, and was already a great IDE. Although I can only agree about Emacs’ incredible versatility, it is still not the ultimate editor when it comes out of the box. Thankfully, its vast plugin library is here to fix that. But among the plethora of options available to you, it is sometimes hard to know where to start. So for now, let me try to assemble a short list of the indispensable plugins to increase your productivity while using Emacs. Although I am heavily geared towards programming related productivity, most of these plugins would be useful to anyone for any usage.

Public Services/Government

• Grenoble, France’s 16th largest city, is committed to the use of free software. This type of ICT solutions facilitaties the sharing of knowledge, empowers citizens and institutions and helps to cut costs, the city said in a statement. The city also sees free software as one of the tools to increase citizen participation.

• Infrabel, Belgium’s government-owned railway network management company, is requesting services and support for two enterprise Linux systems, Red Hat and Suse. Infrabel also seeks support many other open source solution, including network monitoring tools Logstash, Zabbix and Rsyslog, and Java applicatieserver Jboss (renamed WildFly).

• Portugal’s online government gazette, Diário da República Eletrónico (DRE), runs on open source components, including enterprise content management system Liferay and Java application server Jboss (renamed WildFly). INCM, the country’s printing office and mint, is looking for IT services for these and other IT solutions. The two-year contract is estimated to be worth EUR 550,000.

Programming

• We caught up with her recently to talk about how GitHub has evolved into a platform (and what it means to be a platform), how the company figures out which new features and products to build, and the role of open source software in stimulating innovation.

• Perl 6 was unveiled back in October with plans to officially ship the Perl 6.0 for Christmas. Larry Wall and those involved in Perl 6 development have managed to deliver.

• Ruby 2.3.0 will be released this Christmas, and the first preview release was made available a few weeks ago. I’ve been playing around with it and looking at what new features have been introduced.

• Ruby 2.3 features a frozen string literal pragma, a safe navigation operator, and more.

Leftovers

• For a lot of people within IT who’ve been at it for a while, it becomes very easy to continue doing your job and then at the end of a project move on to the next thing. Praise for success and hard work is a way to pause and assess what you’ve accomplished.

Science

• This year has been another great one for open science. At Opensource.com we published several great stories about open science projects that are changing the way we research, collaborate, and solve problems.

Security

• The morning of November 26 brought me interesting news: guys from Perfect Privacy disclosed the Port Fail vulnerability, which can lead to an IP address leak for clients of VPN services with a “port forwarding” feature. I was indignant about their use of the word “vulnerability”. It’s not a vulnerability, just a routing feature: Traffic to VPN server always goes via ISP, outside of VPN tunnel. Pretty obvious thing, I thought, which should be known by any network administrator. Besides that, the note is technically correct, so nothing to worry about. But then the headlines came, and shit hit the fan.

• The source of these reports is a mildly hype-ridden disclosure of a vulnerability in the GRUB2 bootloader by Hector Marco and Ismael Ripoll. It seems that hitting the backspace character at the GRUB2 username prompt enough times will trigger an integer underflow, allowing a bypass of GRUB2′s authentication stage. According to the authors, this vulnerability, exploitable for denial-of-service, information-disclosure, and code-execution attacks, “results in an incalculable number of affected devices.” It is indeed a serious vulnerability in some settings and it needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, some of the most severely affected systems may also be the hardest to patch. But language like the above leads reporters to write that any Linux system can be broken into using the backspace key, which stretches the truth somewhat.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• After almost a year of civil war, the conflicting forces in Yemen sat down on Dec. 15 in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss the prospect of finding a political solution to the conflict that has been raging since March 2015. While this is a necessary step towards ending the violence that has killed thousands, crippled infrastructure had led to a critical humanitarian crisis, so the peace talks should include a mechanism for rebuilding this impoverished nation. Saudi Arabia, which is responsible for most of the destruction with its relentless bombings, should be forced to pay for the terrible damage it has wrought. So should the United States.

• And now in an unusual about turn, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has configured a coalition of 34 mainly Muslim countries “to go after the Islamic state”. In a bitter irony, the key protagonists of this counterterrorism initiative endorsed by the “international community” are Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey, i.e. countries which have relentlessly supported “Islamic terrorism” from the very outset in close liaison with Washington. In the words of Hillary Clinton in her declassified Emails: “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

• Counter terrorism by the state sponsors of terrorism? A New Normal? The propaganda campaign appears to have reached an impasse.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• THE 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) concluded on December 12 with the European Union and 195 countries agreeing on limiting greenhouse gas emissions to a point where the global temperature rise is capped at less than 2° C. The agreement has a strong basis in the principles of shared responsibility and transparency as well as collective oversight in the form of periodic assessments. This has finally brought the world’s governments (including those of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) together and has steered them in a clear direction for making a positive impact in the arena of climate change. But as vital as this development has been, government action cannot fix the problem alone. The private sector is a key participant in this endeavour: it is bigger, more agile, and more influential than any government, or even group of governments, could ever be.

• The phrase “climate change” often summons images of exhaust-spewing trucks and coal plants blackening the skies.

• [...]

• But even people who’ll never visit the region should fear Indonesia’s flaming jungles. When the forest fires rage hardest, they can spew out more emissions per day than the entire US economy, according to the pro-conservation World Resources Institute.

• The fires briefly turned Indonesia — a largely impoverished, Muslim-majority archipelago — into the world’s worst polluter. During particularly smoky spells in September in October, Indonesia daily churned out more greenhouse gases than even China or the US.

• When Indonesia’s fires are tamed, the country is usually pegged as the sixth-worst offender, behind China, the United States, the European Union countries (which are counted as one bloc), India and Russia.

Privacy

• The hype around the Internet of Things has been rising steadily over the past five years. In tech analyst Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report in 2015, the IoT is at the peak of “inflated expectations”, particularly for areas like the smart home, which involve controlling your lights, thermostat or TV using your mobile phone.

• But the era of sensors has only just dawned, according to renowned technology investor and internet pioneer Marc Andreessen. In 10 years, he predicts mobile phones themselves could disappear.

• The Australian government has repeatedly called for citizens to turn off two-factor authentication (2FA) at its main digital government portal, myGov. The portal’s Twitter account has recently been updated several times with cute pictures encouraging holidaymakers to “turn off your myGov security codes” so that “you can spend more time doing the important things.”

• The portal is the place where Australian citizens can use and manage a number of governmental services, including health insurance, tax payments, and child support. In case of myGov, two-factor authentication is implemented by sending users text messages that contain one-time codes to complement their usual passwords.

• A TOP-SECRET document dated February 2011 reveals that British spy agency GCHQ, with the knowledge and apparent cooperation of the NSA, acquired the capability to covertly exploit security vulnerabilities in 13 different models of firewalls made by Juniper Networks, a leading provider of networking and Internet security gear.

• The six-page document, titled “Assessment of Intelligence Opportunity – Juniper,” raises questions about whether the intelligence agencies were responsible for or culpable in the creation of security holes disclosed by Juniper last week. While it does not establish a certain link between GCHQ, NSA, and the Juniper hacks, it does make clear that, like the unidentified parties behind those hacks, the agencies found ways to penetrate the “NetScreen” line of security products, which help companies create online firewalls and virtual private networks, or VPNs. It further indicates that, also like the hackers, GCHQ’s capabilities clustered around an operating system called “ScreenOS,” which powers only a subset of products sold by Juniper, including the NetScreen line. Juniper’s other products, which include high-volume Internet routers, run a different operating system called JUNOS.

• Anyway, I am happy that KDE signed the User Data Manifesto 2.0 a few months ago. Why wait for official legislation when we can do the right thing right now?

• Quite possibly Moxie Marlinspike is right, but for non-casual communications this can still be useful.

• Two months ago I have published a detailed survey of various security-related problems plaguing the Intel x86 platforms. While the picture painted in the paper was rather depressing, I also promised to release a 2nd paper discussing — what I believe to be — a reasonably simple and practical solution addressing most of the issues discussed in the 1st paper. Today I’m releasing this 2nd paper.

• I think it is the first technical paper I’ve written which is not backed by a working proof-of-concept. Incidentally, it might also be one of the most important ones I have authored or co-authored.

Civil Rights

• A junta appointed media reform committee is considering a new measure to control online media that incites “social unrest.”

• Pol.Maj.Gen Pisit Pao-in, the former commander of the Technology Crime Suppression Division who now oversees the government’s ‘reform’ of online media, said on Dec. 24 that he would ask to use the power of Article 44 to crack down on online media, including content deemed to be affecting national security and/or defaming the monarchy.

• Article 44 of the interim constitution grants junta chairman Prayuth Chan-ocha a power to enact any laws or take action to protect “national interests” and “national security.”

• After the talk between the media reform committee and police today, Pisit said representatives from Google are scheduled to meet the committee for a discussion on Jan. 14 and again on Jan. 21. According to the officer, these meetings will be followed by further meetings with representatives from Facebook and the messaging app, LINE, at as yet unspecified dates.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• There are other successful models (this,this,this) for providing free Internet access to people, without giving a competitive advantage to Facebook. Free Basics is the worst of our options.

• Facebook doesn’t pay for Free Basics, telecom operators do. Where do they make money from? From users who pay. By encouraging people to choose Free Basics, Facebook reduces the propensity to bring down data costs for paid Internet access.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has created a device that he believes is costing the music industry $10 million a day, reports TorrentFreak.

• The ‘Kopimashin’, seen in the video below makes 100 copies of the Gnarls Barkley song ‘Crazy’ and sends them all to /dev/null – a technical term meaning the files are deleted as soon as they are saved.

• Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde served his prison sentence last year but still owes the entertainment industries millions in damages. Some might think that he’s learned his lesson, but with a newly built copying machine he’s generating millions of extra ‘damages,’ which might be worth a mention in the Guinness Book of Records.

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