● 11.27.16

● Links 27/11/2016: Linux 4.8.11, Linux 4.4.35, and Distrowatch Rankings

Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The computer’s abilities depend on the type of build-your-own system kit you have. Some computer kits intended to teach children (and other newcomers) the basics of hardware and software run on their own customized operating systems — which are often variations of the free, open-source Linux code.

• Raspberry Pi and Kano are two popular computer kits that provide beginners with the bare-bones components like low-cost motherboards and wireless-networking dongles. These computer boards can be connected to existing monitors and keyboards, or used with new equipment.

Server

• Japan is bound to develop a revolutionary supercomputer able to outcome China regarding technology. The costs of this new device will reach up to $173 million. The computer was planned to be ready for launching starting with next year. The program of the 130-petaflops computer looks very promising, the developers trying to overcome the technology used by China.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.11 kernel.

• All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

Graphics Stack

• Anyone who read any number of my reviews from a few years ago, when I interned here at Phoronix, should know that I have been a fan of AMD and their open source efforts for a very long time. I remember the years of trying to get Catalyst to work under Arch or Fedora, usually only to have it blow up in my face. I remember the struggle holding back kernel and X server updates, hoping that none of those updates contained security fixes that were pertinent to me.

• If you are planning to upgrade your graphics card in a Linux system this holiday season, here are some fresh benchmarks of several different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with various Linux gaming tests under Ubuntu. The AMD tests were done both with the latest RadeonSI Gallium3D stack as well as the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver.

• Tested on the AMD side was the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, RX 460, and RX 480 with both the fully-open driver stack (Linux 4.9 Git + LLVM 4.0 SVN + Mesa 13.1-dev Git as of the end of the week) and then AMDGPU-PRO 16.40.

• Just a word of warning, the Nvidia 375.20 driver seems to have quite a number of issues in certain games bringing performance down a lot.

• Not everyone will have issues, as it seems only certain people are affected. Some people have reported no issues, while others are being given black screens or outright terrible performance.

Applications

• Today, after 4 months of development, we’ve released major updates for both Rspamd and Rmilter: Rspamd is updated to version 1.4 and Rmilter is updated to version 1.10. These updates include many new features, including Redis pool support, new modules, improved neural networks support, zstd compression for protocol and many other important improvements.

• stress-ng is a tool that I have been developing on-and-off for a few years. It is designed to stress kernels to force out bugs, stress CPU and memory and also contains some performance benchmarking metrics too.

• 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.

• Sometimes you need to transfer and organize just a handful of specific photos and raw files from your camera, and a simple GUI tool can help your with that. This tool is just a short Bash shell script uses the YAD tool to generate a drag-and-drop floating palette. When you drop files onto the palette and press the Execute button, the script copies the selected files to the specified directory and organizes them using the ExifTool-based commands.

Proprietary

• Roughly a month ago, I reviewed Spotify here on OCS-Mag, testing the recently revived Ubuntu version. My experience was mixed. While the media player sported good looks and a sleek interface, the overall behavior was slightly erratic, culminating in crashes when trying to play local files.

• Since, I have spent more time exploring Spotify, not necessarily because I was enamored by its features and abilities, mostly because I felt it would be a worthy exercise for all those seeking the thrills of popular media streaming on Linux. Furthermore, like my past endeavors with Steam, Sketchup and alike, it’s part of a possibly Don Quixotic attempt to bridge the application gap between Windows and Linux, and give the users of the latter system some more freedom and choice. But there’s a cost. Sometimes, things do not work right away, or they do not work at all. This article is the diary of my journey.

• Vivaldi, the browser aimed at power users, was updated to version 1.5 today, bringing support for bulk tab commands, smart-home lighting integration, and more.

• As a reminder, Vivaldi browser is built using open source technologies, like the Blink engine, Node.js, and React.js, but is not open source software. It includes features such as tab stacks, Opera-like Speed dial which supports multiple folders, as well as built-in notes, and a tool called Quick Commands, that can be used to search through the Vivaldi history, open tabs, settings, bookmarks and more.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Co-founders of Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), the largest open source virtual reality consortium in the world, today announced a Steam update that provides support for OSVR content on Steam. The news means that universal VR content is now accessible through a single point of distribution.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I spent some time over the last weeks to port Gwenview Importer to KDE Frameworks 5, as I was getting frustrated with importing pictures by hand. It’s a straight port: no new features.

• Here is a screenshot after I filled my SD Card with random pictures of my daughter and cat for the purpose of illustrating this blog post

• It’s time for KDE Emerge to emerge as Craft.

• After many years of being the KDE Windows build tool we want to make KDE Emerge more visible and a tool for all developers.

• People associate Emerge with Gentoo, and they are right about it. This was a problem for many years now.

• For that reason Emerge will be called Craft from now on.

• There were couple of really nice talks – some less technical like the one from Jon Kalb of CppCon to the low level ones like the Rainer’s talk about the memory model of C++. Also, seing Bjarne Stroustrup in-person was a pleasure.

• The initial support for Supernovae in KStars was added back in 2011, but it relied on parsing an HTML page using a Python script to extract the necessary information on the latest discovered supernovae. It was obviously a very crude and hackish way to get the data, and I longed to rely on a better source for our data.

• The Harvard page we were relying on for supernovae updates suddenly stopped posting any further updates, its last update was made in 2015. Thankfully, we discovered a new gold trove of information: The Open Supernovae Catalog project!

• libelektra is a configuration library and tools set. It provides very many capabilities. Here I’d like to show how to observe data model changes from key/value manipulations outside of the actual application inside a user desktop. libelektra broadcasts changes as D-Bus messages. The Oyranos projects will use this method to sync the settings views of GUI’s, like qcmsevents, Synnefo and KDE’s KolorManager with libOyranos and it’s CLI tools in the next release.

• Friday November 18 was a productive day for the Kubuntu Community, as three new people were questioned and then elected into Membership. Welcome Simon Quigley, José Manuel Santamaría, and Walter Lapchynski as they package, work on our tooling, promote Kubuntu and help users.

• Admit it: how many times you have seen “software from this branch is completely untested, use it at your own risk” when you checked the latest code from any FOSS project? I bet you have, many times. For any reasonably modern project, this is not entirely true: Continuous Integration and automated testing are a huge help in ensuring that the code builds and at least does what it is supposed to do. KDE is no exception to this, thanks to build.kde.org and a growing number of unit tests.

• Last week I concentrated most of my development work on screenshot support through spectacle in a KWin Wayland session. Now I am happy to announce that we merged support for capturing a screenshot of a window with the help of an external application like spectacle.

• To explain why this is a great achievement we first need to look at X11. On X11 taking a screenshot of a window is easy. It’s part of the X protocol to read the pixmap data of the root window and you get the position and size of each window. Thus one is able to cut out the window and have it as a screenshot. That’s the most simple variant to do it, spectacle and previously ksnapshot do it differently. More on that later on.

• Ark, the file archiver and compressor developed by KDE, has seen a lot of development for the upcoming 16.12 release. This blog post provides a summary of the most important changes.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In this article I listed my favorite GNOME Shell Extensions (GSE) that I, myself, had ever used. GSE in GNOME is similar with Addons in Firefox, they add and extend desktop functionality with many features. I listed here GSE for screen recording, proxy, network indicator, and some more.

• Regardless of the factual conclusion of this article, you are already sold on it just based on the title. Anyway. Humans are really good at solving problems, especially, or possibly only, if they are linear. It is not a coincidence that we have manuals that follow through a simple top-down logic or that navigation systems use turn-by-turn instructions. Square root of 7443 anyone? But this is not a biology lesson. And yet, it is.

• Operating systems are designed to help users translate their linear thinking into instructions. When they do this successfully, we have what we call intuitive interfaces. When they don’t, we have nerdy things that no one wants to use. The system menu is probably the most important ingredient of any desktop, as it’s the gateway to all we do on a computer. Most of these solutions are linear. Things go bad otherwise. Just check my Fedora 18 review for a quick reminder. Windows 8 anyone? Now Linux wise, there’s also this thing called Gnome Pie. It’s a radical answer to the idea of a system menu, and a challenge to the whole linearity concept. Does it work?

Distributions

• If you plan on checking out AV Linux, keep in mind that the live session ISO (which you must run in order to install or even load) requires a user name and a password to log in. You will find these necessities hidden in the ISO file name.

• For the 64-bit version, the user name is isotester. The password is avl64. The 32-bit version is similar. Use isotester with avl32. For security reasons, you can not access root accounts on the LiveISO.

Reviews

New Releases

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

• Debian is preparing to revise its default file system mapping to bring it in in line with other major distributions (like Fedora and CentOS).

• Evidence of the shift can be found in the bootstrap option that’s arrived in its unstable branch, where Debian dev Ansgar Burchardt posted news that mailing list announcement: “debootstrap in unstable can now install with merged-/usr, that is with /bin, /sbin, /lib* being symlinks to their counterpart in /usr.”

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I recently found myself needing a machine to compile binaries on for a CentOS server. I first considered actually spinning up a CentOS system on a VPS; however, that seemed a little overboard just for compiling, I then realized that this would be the perfect use for a container. I could have an identical system to the one where the binaries will be deployed on, and at little cost since it can simply be blown away when I’m done. In order to set up my compile machine I used LXC.

• LXC, or “Linux Containers”, are a set of tools for creating full-featured containers. Compared to other tools such as systemd-nspawn, LXC is much more complex, and it has been used to build projects such as Docker. Docker has since moved away from LXC, however LXC is still one of the huge players in the Linux container game. The Linux container project also brings LXD, a daemon that can be used to manage containers. LXD makes a larger use of system images, as opposed to templates, in order to allow quick deployment of containers. Together these projects allow easy deployment and management of containers, as well as as advanced features and customizability.

• The Ubuntu 16.10 operating system was released last month. The new version, which is also called Yakkety Yak, came around six months after Canonical – the company behind Ubuntu – released version 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) of the Linux-based operating system.

• We’ve already discussed the changes that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS brought along, so in this article we’ll be covering a quick overview of Ubuntu 16.10 desktop, essentially focusing on the major new features/changes it brings to the table when compared to version 16.04 LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi is a series of single-board, low-cost, high-performance computer first developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Raspberry Pi 3 is the sixth and latest iteration to be released in the series and it just keeps getting better.

• Intel’s Compute Stick is basically a fully functional, low-power PC crammed into a device that looks like an oversized USB flash drive. Plug it into the HDMI port on a TV, connect a power source, and you can run Windows, Linux, or other operating systems on a TV, monitor, or commercial display.

Phones

• On November 8, 2016, the proto_v2 schematics were updated to the current version. We finished the last few improvements and our layouter is scheduling the layout to start in one week. We repeat our invitation to give the schematics a peer review: it’s your last chance to peel your eyes on these schematics and be picky about details that our engineering team might have missed. Hopefully you won’t find anything, but as Joerg says:

• YunOS, the mobile operating system developed by Alibaba Group, is on track to corner a 14 per cent share of smartphone shipments in mainland China by the end of this year, pulling ahead of Apple’s iOS to become the second-largest operating system for that device in the market, according to analysts.

• The forecasts would confirm Alibaba’s claim earlier this year that YunOS had initially passed iOS on the mainland in the three months ended March 31.

• Despite the strong strides made by the Alibaba platform, Bernstein senior analyst Mark Li told the South China Morning Post

Android

• The Tor Project has released Tor Phone–a privacy-focused and secure version of Android mobile OS. It’s based on Copperhead OS, a hardened Android distribution. Tor Phone also uses OrWall to force all the connections over Tor network.

• Spent a few days re-writing newsFish for Android, to bring it up to the same level as the SailfishOS version.

• This version is better tested, works with nextCloud 10, has better navigation and is generally all-round smoother.

• It also compiled against Qt 5.7, and uses QtQuick.controls, instead of custom made controls.

• It doesnt have many advanced features like adding feeds, folders or starring, but these may come.

Free Software/Open Source

• End-to-end encryption gives users true privacy, preventing anyone else from eavesdropping on conversations — even the very communications services they’re using. This is incredibly important for a decentralised ecosystem like Matrix on which Riot is built, where data can span across many different servers, and users should not have to trust any of those servers.

• End-to-end encryption is also a real differentiating feature from most other popular collaboration apps whose business models fundamentally rely on being able to read, analyse and profile your conversations.

• A few days ago we hit a milestone in our development of AtCore. We are now able to properly install the libary for general use. Not only is installing a necessary for a libary that you plan to use within other stuff it also means that we can now focus our attention mostly on Atelier. We have now entered that magical time in development when the real world usage begins to drive its development. Thanks to everyone efforts we are almost ready for the next stage. Patrick has been doing reviews on every pull request. While he has been unable to help with as many commits as he would have liked to. His advice and direction in his reviews has been really helpful and has kept our style and code quality at a high level. Tomaz has been busy fixing up AtCore to be a proper KF5 libary with all the cmake deployment parts to go along with it. Most all of the cmake stuff has been written by Tomaz. Lays has been working on Atelier setup and getting all the non AtCore parts working. Thanks to her effort we are now able to use Atcore from Atelier!

• As for me i have been adding stuff to AtCore. Since our last progress update a few new things have been added. Emergency Stop this simply allows you to stop the printer using the emergency stop code.It also cleans up any the command queue. Pause/Resume when paused we store the current location of the head that that way after resume you can move your print head out of the way to access the model.Pause supports a comma seperated string of commands to be sent after pause. For my printer i use “G91,G0 Z1,G90,G1 X0 Y195″ when pause this move my head up 1 mm and then pushes my model out toward the front fo the machine. This is useful if you want to maybe put a nut into printed part or change filament durring print and even to corrrect print defects while printing. We have also started to do lay ground work for more status info being picked out from the serial chatter. Setting of the firmware plugin can be done durring connect to force a specific plugin. A progress bar for printing progress. Some cleanup for autodetection of the plugin. There is still things to add to AtCore but it should provide enough for most use cases already!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• NoScript, the one must have add-on for Firefox if you ask me, has received an update recently that introduces full multi-process compatibility (e10s).

• Mozilla announced a far reaching change coming to the organization’s Firefox web browser in late 2017.

• The organization plans to cut support of all extension technologies but the rather new WebExtensions when Firefox 57 Stable is released.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Funding

• Money is one of the most difficult subjects to talk about when it comes to open source projects. It’s a basic fundamental truth that all open source projects need money to operate, and while open source software provides a plethora of benefits, I don’t think any reasonable person would tell you that a steady stream of income is one of them. Lots of people and organizations have presented different ideas and undertaken different experiments to try and maximize the amount of money coming in, while at the same time remaining open, fair, and accessible.

BSD

• The next release of DragonFlyBSD will feature better EFI support.

• DragonFly lead developer Matthew Dillon has landed EFI runtime ABI support that was ported over from the FreeBSD code-base.

• This EFI runtime ABI support allows for querying and setting the time, scanning EFI BIOS variables, and more. This code was ported from FreeBSD but with various changes for DragonFlyBSD’s different kernel interfaces.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Electronics are popular gifts for the holidays, but people often overlook the restrictions that manufacturers slip under the wrapping paper. From surveillance to harsh rules about copying and sharing, some gifts take more than they give.

• The good news is that there are ethical companies making better devices that your loved ones can enjoy with freedom and privacy. Today, we’re launching the 2016 Giving Guide, your key to smarter and more ethical tech gifts.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Dashbot uses the C.H.I.P. Pro, essentially a miniaturized single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi. The chip runs Linux and is completely open source for your hacking pleasure.

Programming/Development

• We are proud to announce that Samsung has joined the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Foundation is the leading open source organization whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying, and managing software across the lifecycle. In tandem with Eclipse’s mission, Samsung provides an open and interoperable platform for IoT development through the Samsung ARTIK Smart IoT Platform.

• Have you ever wonder how everything works? From Smartphones Operating Systems to even each and every Linux Distro and every Operating System created by Microsoft and Apple. How does it play my favorite music? How does it save my files to the cloud? How does actually everything works? All this questions are answered with one big bolded and all capital “PROGRAMMING”.

Leftovers

Science

• rozen beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars lies about as much water as what’s in Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes, researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have determined.

• Scientists examined part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter’s ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes with the onboard radar instrument reveal a deposit more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 260 feet (80 meters) to about 560 feet (170 meters), with a composition that’s 50 to 85 percent water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles.

• At the latitude of this deposit — about halfway from the equator to the pole — water ice cannot persist on the surface of Mars today. It sublimes into water vapor in the planet’s thin, dry atmosphere. The Utopia deposit is shielded from the atmosphere by a soil covering estimated to be about 3 to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) thick.

• “This deposit probably formed as snowfall accumulating into an ice sheet mixed with dust during a period in Mars history when the planet’s axis was more tilted than it is today,” said Cassie Stuurman of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the lead author of a report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Hardware

• The latest rumor surrounding AMD’s upcoming and much-hyped Zen architecture has it slated for a launch on January 17. Purportedly the first chips to be released will be high-end desktop components, with their initial unveiling coming a week earlier at the CES event in Las Vegas.

Security

• Acquired administrator level access to all of the Microsoft Azure managed Red Hat Update Infrastructure that supplies all the packages for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances booted from the Azure marketplace.

• I use application-level sandboxing a lot because I make mistakes a lot; and when writing web applications, the price of making mistakes is very dear. In the early 2000s, that meant using systrace(4) on OpenBSD and NetBSD. Then it was seccomp(2) (followed by libseccomp(3)) on Linux. Then there was capsicum(4) on FreeBSD and sandbox_init(3) on Mac OS X.

• Apache is the most popular web server on Earth, with a market share of 46.4% — well above Nginx (21.8%) and Microsoft IIS (9.8%). Thanks to Linux package managers like Yum and APT you can install and get it up and running in minutes. The core installation even features powerful modules for URL rewriting, user authentication, and more.

• Don’t believe it? I didn’t either; it never worked for me. It turns out that’s only because the contemporary instructions for how to do it are wrong, or rather, they’ve mutated into a form that only works on some machines. As originally discovered, the hack reliably unlocks any* ThinkPad up to and including the Ivy Bridge models.

Finance

• The Director of Education Standards for the Ministry, Huzaifa Mutazindwa, told CNN that the nursery and primary schools were not licensed, the teachers weren’t qualified and that there was no record of its curriculum being approved.

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