● 07.11.16

● Links 11/7/2016: PCLinuxOS 64 LXDE 2016.07, Unity On Vista 10

Posted in News Roundup at 2:40 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• As I am sure you have heard me mention before, Linux is free to download and install as there is no licence fee. There are also many different distributions available, some of which have been specifically designed to work on old or low powered hardware. With the added bonus that malware is virtually non-existent on Linux (it really is secure), it means you can turn your old PC that was gathering dust into a working machine that is also safer to use than before.

• A lot of Linux distributions come with software preloaded, so you can be up and running in no time. Ubuntu for instance comes with LibreOffice and Thunderbird preloaded, which means all of your office and email needs are sorted without you having to worry about additional downloads, or forking out on some third party product.

Kernel Space

• Because it is very difficult to compile a Linux kernel, Canonical has packed all the kernel releases as deb packages and made them available for everybody that uses Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based systems, via its kernel.ubuntu.com repository.

• Veteran X.Org/X developer Keith Packard along with well known open-source advocate Bdale Garbee have been working on an “inexpensive yet robust” USB-based hardware random number generator.

• After years of work on this USB hardware RNG, they finally have a device they are taking into production: ChaosKey v1.0. There’s already the mainline ChaosKey driver for supporting this true random number generator and the device itself is also open-source. ChaosKey 1.0 was presented at this week’s DebConf16 Debian conference in Cape Town.

• It’s Sunday night, so guess what? Yes, that’s right, Linus Torvalds has just announced the availability of the seventh Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel branch.

• Linus Torvalds has unleashed a sweary rant on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, labelling some members “brain-damaged” for their preferred method of punctuating comments.

• “Can we please get rid of the brain-damaged stupid networking comment syntax style, PLEASE?” the Linux Lord asked last Friday.

• “If the networking people cannot handle the pure awesomeness that is a balanced and symmetric traditional multi-line C style comments, then instead of the disgusting unbalanced crap that you guys use now, please just go all the way to the C++ mode.”

Graphics Stack

• Being half-way through the year now and also given the recent Mesa 12.0 release I decided to run some Git statistics on Mesa to see how this year is panning out for its development.

• As of this morning, Mesa is at 5115 files that together have a total of 1,879,768 lines of code. There have been 83,063 recorded commits from 723 different authors / email addresses.

Benchmarks

• After finishing up this weekend’s AMDGPU R9 Fury + RX 480 benchmarks of DRM-Next for material that will land with Linux 4.8 along with RX 480 overclocking support, tables turned to run some fresh benchmarks of the Intel DRM-Next code that will premiere in Linux 4.8.

• Material queued up so far in DRM-Next for Linux 4.8 includes better DisplayPort++ dongle support, L3 cache tuning, continued GuC work, and a whole lot more. There is also GVT-g para-virtualized GPU support.

Applications

• MiniTube is beautiful, lightweight and a native YouTube client. With MiniTube you can watch YouTube videos by typing keyword into the search-box and MiniTube will immediately loads the results. It offers two type of searches: channel search and keyword search. It provides endless video stream, playback on MiniTube is smooth and instant, without a noticeable buffering time, as I tested. Minitube does not require the Flash Player.

• FFmpeg is a popular multimedia framework, that enables the users to easily ncode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play audio and video content.

• Slightly later than on monthly schedule but Weblate 2.7 is out today. This release brings improvements to the API and is first to officially support wlc a command line client for Weblate.

• MPV maintainer Martin Herkt released today, July 10, 2016, a new point release of the MPV 0.18.x series, bringing a handful of new features, small improvements to options and commands, and many bug fixes.

• However, there’s one major change in the MPV 0.18.1 that would interest many OS vendors, namely the fact that MPV now requires the versions of the FFmpeg or Libav libraries which with the open-source, MPlayer-based video player application was compiled.

• Of course, this translates to the fact that if MPV 0.18.1 was compiled against FFmpeg 3.1.1 “Laplace,” which is the latest version at the moment of writing this article, the maintainers of the GNU/Linux distribution you’re using will need to update the FFmpeg package as well when they are adding MPV 0.18.1 to their repositories.

Instructionals/Technical

• A while back, I found myself in need of two webservers that would terminate TLS (with different rules). I wanted to run some custom code I’d written (which uses TLS peer authentication), and also nginx on port 443.

• The best way I figured out how to do this was to write a tool to sit on port 443, and parse TLS Client Hello packets, and dispatch to the correct backend depending on the SNI name.

Games

• The promising Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game has been in development for years, is powered by the Daemon Engine as a distant derivative of id Tech 3, and has shown much potential from the engine to artwork. However, the past few months have been eerily quiet.

• The last Unvanquished release was Alpha 50, which came in April. Normally, Unvanquished Alpha releases have come the first/second Sunday of every month, but now we’ve missed that for May, June, and it looks like July too.

• It’s been a while since we last heard anything from Guild Software, the developer of the Vendetta Online 3D space combat MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) for PCs and mobile platforms.

• The Vendetta Online 1.8.380 update was released a few days ago, and it promises lots of goodies, but only for PC platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. The rest of the supported platforms, such as Android and iOS, will get the new features in a future update.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• From what I understand Kube is entirely developed with Qt, reuses some parts of Kontact, the standard KDE/Plasma groupware client relies on the next version of Akonadi (this data & authentification backend from KDE) while being truly multiplatform (Windows Linux, OSX, Android and iOS). You can give it an early try by following the instructions listed here.

• We have a new alpha release of Marble Maps in the Google Play store! It is available to registered alpha testers. We would like to gather feedback on the new turn-by-turn navigation mode before releasing a new public beta version in two weeks. See our release schedule for more details.

• Sanjiban and me worked a lot on polishing the turn-by-turn navigation mode lately. It can be activated after calculating a route. During turn-by-turn navigation the map follows your current position and upcoming turns are announced using text-to-speech

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This post describes some of my experience with the Meson Build system. Also I have created a playground for GTK which I use to create simple protoypes with some functionality. The really nice thing about Meson is its python-ish/lua-ish syntax. The other thing is that it is really fast.

• It seems people are interested in adding support for flatpaks into other software centers, and I thought I might be useful to explain how I did this in gnome-software. I’m lucky enough to have a plugin architecture to make all the flatpak code be self contained in one file, but that’s certainly not a requirement.

Distributions

New Releases

• HandyLinux offers a simplified approach for those who are new to the Linux desktop operating system. The developers make it easy to peal off the “Handy” layers to reveal a more standard Linux environment as users learn the system. Those who no longer need the IT tools included with the initial installation can remove them easily using the Handy2Debian application from the main menu.

• It looks like the “This Week in Solus” weekly newsletter are a thing again, and this is the second week in a row Solus developer Joshua Strobl announces a new installation to keep the community updated with the latest innovations.

• Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today, July 10, 2016, about the availability for download of the Beta of the 4MLinux 19.0 operating system, which will be released later this year.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• We reported a few days ago that PCLinuxOS tester Ika has announced the release of his PCLinuxOS 64 Xfce 2016.07 and PCLinuxOS 64 LXDE 2016.07 Community Edition operating systems.

Arch Family

• We hope you are enjoying your time on our site and we also want to make it better. Its been a long time for this so today we are bringing seventh segment of “Introduction with Linux Distro” series.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• About two weeks ago, some visitors of the openSUSE Conference enjoyed playing openSUSE Jeopardy.

• The Germany-based SUSE Linux and Microsoft have inked a new deal that focuses on the public cloud business and has updated terms and commitments, according to Kristin Kinan, global alliance director for public cloud at SUSE.

• This supercedes earlier agreements between the two companies, Kinan said, in response to queries from iTWire.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

• The founder of the Debian GNU/Linux project, Ian Murdock, took his own life, according to a autopsy report obtained by CNNMoney.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s possible to run the Unity desktop with Compiz window manager atop Windows 10.

• Ubuntu developer Adolfo Jayme Barrientos pointed out a ticket showing it’s possible to get Unity up and running on Windows 10.

• The Windows 10 Anniversary Update coming in August includes an unusual feature aimed at developers: an Ubuntu sub-system that lets you run Linux software using a command-line interface.

• Preview versions have been available since April, and while Microsoft and Canonical worked together to bring support for the Bash terminal to Windows 10, it didn’t take long for some users to figure out that they could get some desktop Linux apps to run in Windows.

• At least three Linux distros have already quit releasing 32-bit versions, and Ubuntu seems to be standing in line to do the same. Is the end at hand for 32-bit mainstream distros?

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it.

• They came up with a new way to store computer programs, called “rope memory,” and created a special version of the assembly programming language. Assembly itself is obscure to many of today’s programmers—it’s very difficult to read, intended to be easily understood by computers, not humans. For the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), MIT programmers wrote thousands of lines of that esoteric code.

SaaS/Back End

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle has told The Register it is “committed” to Java amid growing fears the IT giant had all but given up on Java EE – aka Java Platform, Enterprise Edition.

• The Redwood City titan said it will present fresh plans for the future of Java EE 8 at its JavaOne conference in San Francisco in September.

BSD

• The developers of the NAS4Free open-source and free embedded storage BSD-based distribution for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and other UNIX-like systems, announced the release of NAS4Free 10.3.0.3.

Licensing/Legal

• It did not respond to a request for comment from The Verge today, but later posted a statement about its standards for live video. “Just as it gives us a window into the best moments in people’s lives, it can also let us bear witness to the worst,” the company wrote. “Live video can be a powerful tool in a crisis — to document events or ask for help.”

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• What’s the size of a standard euro-palette, goes together in 15 minutes, and can charge 120 mobile phones at one time? At least one correct answer is Sunzilla, the open source solar power generator. The device does use some proprietary components, but the entire design is open source. It contains solar panels, of course, as well as storage capacity and an inverter.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

Defence/Aggression

• A devastating report on the U.K.’s eager participation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq was released this week, as corpses are still being pulled from the rubble in the aftermath of Baghdad’s largest suicide truck bombing since that ill-fated 2003 invasion began. The document is known as “The Chilcot Report,” after its principal investigator and author, Sir John Chilcot. The inquiry was commissioned in 2009 by Britain’s then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Chilcot released the 6,000-page report Wednesday morning, seven years after the work began. It offers a litany of critiques against former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet, exposing the exaggeration of the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and Blair’s unwavering fealty to President George W. Bush. “It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments. … They were not challenged,” Chilcot writes in his statement that accompanied the report’s release.

• Brexit is a disaster we can only understand in the context of Britain’s imperial exploits. A Bullingdon boy (Oxford frat boy) gamble has thrown Britain into the deepest political and economic crisis since the second world war and has made minority groups across the UK vulnerable to racist and xenophobic hatred and violence.

• People of color, in particular those in the global South, know all too well what it is to be at the receiving end of the British establishment’s divisive top-down interventions. Scapegoating migrants is a divisive tool favored by successive governments, but the British establishment’s divide and rule tactic was honed much further afield in the course of its colonial exploits. Britain has a long history of invading, exploiting, enslaving and murdering vast numbers of people, crimes for which it has never been held accountable.

• With the Chilcot report, Great Britain somewhat came to grips with its role in the criminal invasion of Iraq, but neocon-controlled Washington still refuses to give the American people any honest accounting, explains ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• As NATO presses up to Russia’s borders – with secret schemes to influence and absorb unwilling populations – Russia has begun to push back, explaining the origins of the new Cold War, as Natylie Baldwin describes.

• Newt Gingrich, who is being vetted to be Donald Trump’s running mate and appeared with the candidate in Cincinnati on Wednesday, left the campaign trail this weekend for an unusual reason. The former Speaker of the House had to fly to Paris to appear at a gala celebration for the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Mujahedin, an Iranian exile group that wants Washington’s backing for regime change in Iran.

• In his remarks, Gingrich heaped praise on the MEK’s efforts, and congratulated them on the presence of another dignitary, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a senior member of the Saudi royal family and a former head of that nation’s intelligence service.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• While admitting a “mistake,” Hillary Clinton was largely unrepentant about the FBI calling her “extremely careless” in safeguarding national security data, another sign of a troubling double standard, says ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• It was a few days after my wedding. I was supposed to be honeymooning at a nearby winery with my newly minted husband, celebrating our unlikely marriage at age 55.

• Instead, I was sitting on the railroad tracks in the pouring rain. Along with 20 other brave souls, some weeping, some singing, I was facing down a locomotive in a town — Vancouver, Washington — that many fear will be forced to accept the largest oil-by-rail terminal in the country.

• Why would anyone do something like that?

• Because a few short days before, we’d watched in horror as a mile-long train filled with Bakken crude derailed in Mosier, Oregon and burst into towering flames.

Finance

• The European Commission on 8 July published the finalized Comprehensive Economic Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA) and formally proposed to Council to sign the agreement, pushing for provisional implementation amidst ongoing discussions over competency issues with EU member states. After finalising CETA in August 2014, the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system was renegotiated last year.

• It’s common in the food industry to boost profits by misleading customers about an animal’s origins, but this kind of fraud is especially rampant when it comes to seafood. From 2010 to 2012, the conservation agency Oceana conducted DNA tests on seafood in 21 states and found that one-third of the samples had been mislabeled. A whopping 87 percent of the “red snapper” samples were bogus, swapped in for cheaper fish like tilapia or rockfish. Florida’s prized grouper is also often replaced with tilapia or even farmed Asian catfish. Most customers can’t tell the difference, but mislabeling hurts people at both ends of the supply chain: Tilapia mislabeled as grouper can cost the consumer $4 more per eight-ounce fillet at the grocery store, and $12 extra per fillet at a restaurant. And fishermen who respect conservation quotas wind up selling true grouper at a deflated price.

• Yesterday, during an event at the Brazilian Industry Confederation (CNI), the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Trade, Mr. Marcos Pereira, has announced that the Brazilian participation in the negotiations of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) was recently authorised by the President, Mr. Michel Temer.

• The TISA is an international treaty to improve and expand commercial exchange of services. The agreement, under negotiation since 2013 for more than 23 countries, including the United States and the European Union, aims to set a new threshold on market access and universal rules regarding the trade of services.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• There has been close coordination between the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, and those representing her on the committee shaping the party’s platform. It is here that a battle was waged with reformers representing Bernie Sanders over party positions on a large number of important issues. The positions and behavior of those acting as Clinton proxies can therefore provide a window into her attitude toward the movement Sanders has launched.

• As the contentious Democratic Party platform drafting committee negotiations come to an end, many Bernie Sanders surrogates have watched in disbelief as core progressive principles have been waylaid—largely by Hillary Clinton supporters.

• These are just a couple of thoughts about whether Jeremy Corbyn should be excluded from the ballot for Labour leadership if he is unable to obtain a certain amount of nominations.

• The first thought is a legal one, the second thought is a political one.

• On the legal side, it seems to me that the Labour NEC could lawfully exclude the current leader from the ballot if he does not have sufficient nominations.

• I know this argument goes against what has been contended elsewhere (that Corbyn should automatically be on the ballot as leader), but law is sometimes like that. Lawyers and legal pundits can have different views.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The celebrated actor-director looks at the way censorship has been influenced by conservative and bigoted ideas about morality, nationalism, culture and community.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On the afternoon of October 26 last year the Metropolitan Police arrived at a house in County Antrim in Northern Ireland to arrest a 15-year-old boy for hacking into the TalkTalk computer network and stealing the personal details of 157,000 customers, including bank account and credit card details. In the days that followed, three more teenagers and a 20-year-old man were arrested in relation to the attack.

• Fans of Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) Linux operating system use it because of the well-documented security and anonymity features it provides. The system utilizes a Tor browser, which also affords more anonymity to users while browsing sites on the web. The Linux Journal is a monthly technology magazine and news site that focuses on topics related to Linux and open source programs.

• When a young labor lawyer named Andrew Schmidt first filed suit against Uber in December of last year, he couldn’t have predicted it would make him a target. Schmidt’s suit was a legal longshot, alleging that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick coordinated surge pricing in violation of anti-trust laws — but those legal arguments would soon be overshadowed by something much stranger.

• A few weeks after the case was filed, Schmidt found out he was being investigated. According to a court declaration made by Schmidt and his colleagues, someone had called one of Schmidt’s lawyer friends in Colorado to ask some strange questions, claiming it was for a project “profiling up-and-coming labor lawyers in the US.” What was the nature of his relationship with the plaintiff? Who was the driving force behind the lawsuit? Calls were also allegedly made to acquaintances of Schmidt’s client, Spencer Meyer, with a similar proposal to profile “up-and-coming researchers in environmental conservation.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Bahamas issued a travel warning to the United States on Friday, cautioning its citizens about police violence in the country.

• “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration has taken a note of the recent tensions in some American cities over shootings of young black males by police officers,” the statement read. “We wish to advise all Bahamians traveling to the US but especially to the affected cities to exercise appropriate caution generally. In particular young males are asked to exercise extreme caution in affected cities in their interactions with the police. Do not be confrontational and cooperate.”

• The statement follows the tragic deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of police earlier this week, as well as five officers in Dallas in a sniper attack on Thursday.

• Despite the charged rhetoric, Black Lives Matter demonstrators were far from adversarial toward the Dallas police, even as they peacefully protested police shootings and racist policing. In the hours before the officers were attacked, the police force Twitter account was tweeting pictures of officers posing and smiling with demonstrators.

• Last night, Mark Hughes was the most wanted man in America. As the suspected shooter at a Dallas Black Lives Matter protest in which five police officers were killed, Hughes’ face was plastered across network news and social media before he even knew.

• “We were here just for a peaceful protest. He was allowing himself to carry a firearm, but that’s his constitutional right,” said Cory Hughes, one of the Dallas protest organizers and the wrongly accused’s brother.

• “I don’t know what to say,” the misidentified suspect Hughes said. “I could have easily been shot.”

• At the time he was accused, Hughes hadn’t even checked his social media feeds.

• We have too much law enforcement, too deeply enmeshed in our lives, and that fact is making us less, not more safe.

• A congressman is calling on the Justice Department to investigate the fatal shooting by Baton Rouge, La. police of a black man who was on the ground, in the process of being arrested.

• Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) made the request, after a video of the slaying went viral Tuesday night, sparking outrage on social media and protests in Baton Rouge. Alton Sterling, 37, was killed by two cops early Tuesday morning, after they were called to a convenience store, having received an anonymous report about a man with a gun.

• Police arrested Deray Mckesson, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter, and two journalists during a protest against police violence in Baton Rouge Saturday night.

• Mckesson was taken into custody as he live streamed the encounter on Perisope.

• The East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office said that 101 people were being held in the parish jail, the Associated Press reported.

• DeRay McKesson, one of the most prominent activists associated with the police reform protest movement, was arrested in Baton Rouge, where he traveled earlier Saturday to demonstrate in solidarity with residents angered by the recent death of Alton Sterling after an officer-involved shooting that was captured on video.

• McKesson was taken into custody around 11 p.m. in what two fellow activists who witnessed it described as a physically violent arrest.

• Federal prosecutors in Kentucky have formally indicted the man who revealed himself as “KYAnonymous” more than three years ago.

• Deric Lostutter was charged Thursday under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the notorious anti-hacking statute that dates back to the 1980s.

• The case stretches back several years, to 2012. After The New York Times published an account late that year of a horrific rape against a teenage girl in Steubenville, Ohio, an online vigilante campaign was started. Spearheaded by someone calling himself “KYAnonymous,” the campaign targeted local officials whom the vigilantes felt weren’t prosecuting the rape investigation seriously because the alleged perpetrators were high school football players.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• NBC Universal has patented a new technology that can detect high volume file-sharing swarms, including those using BitTorrent. The system is set up to detect popular pirated files and gathers data that can be used for anti-piracy purposes, business intelligence, and to help ISPs relieve strain on their networks.

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