Open Source | Steve Woods

Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 released

22/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

The announcement below has been posted under the News section of the GNU website.

GNU Hurd is the GNU project’s replacement for the Unix kernel and comprises a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control and other features that are implemented by the Unix or similar kernels (e.g. Linux).

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian “sid” at the time of the Debian “wheezy” release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.

The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd.

Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 10.000 software packages available (more than 75% of the Debian archive, and more to come!).

Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ, and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.

Due to the very small number of developers, our progress of the project has not been as fast as other successful operating systems, but we believe to have reached a very decent state, even with our limited resources.

We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd over the past decades. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or another. Thanks everybody!
Amarok 2.7.1 “Harbinger” released

17/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
Amarok is a great media player for the Linux platform and one I’ve used for years; and now it’s also available for Unix and Windows too.

The Amarok team announced the release of version 2.7.1, codenamed “Harbinger” on Wednesday this week. According to the following from the release announcement, it’s a release to fix one bug in particular:
The Amarok Team has discovered a very unpleasant bug in QtWebkit ↔ GStreamer interaction that made continuous playing almost impossible, due to frequent crashing. We decided to work around it in our code and take it as an opportunity to release a bugfix version. It contains a couple of other fixes we deemed important.

This version only contains some very essential fixes and changes compared to 2.7.0:
- A modification in handling MusicBrainz ID tags was needed to avoid problems with falsely duplicate tracks.
- We fixed a weird behaviour when the “Use Music Location?” question is answered “Yes” on the first run.
- We now have worked around the QtWebkit ↔ GStreamer bug that caused frequent crashes on track start; this happened if the Wikipedia applet tried to load a page containing an audio tag.
- The database is now also created if the home directory contains non-ASCII characters.
- The Nepomuk Collection now also shows track numbers.
These changes have also been incorporated into the next release – 2.8.0 – which is still in development and promises yet more fixes and enhancements.
Open source “strengthens democracy”

17/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Croatian President Ivo Josipović
Open source strengthens democracy, according to Croatian President Ivo Josipović, as reported on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website.

Josipović appreciates the open source community’s creative and innovative spirit and is reported as saying: “What you are doing is something good, creative and innovative”, while opening the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 in Zagreb on Wednesday 15th May. As regards democracy, the President remarked: “Most importantly, open source helps to strengthen democracy.”

President Josipović also expressed his “complete support” for the government plans to implement open source and open standards (what about open data? A stool needs three legs, not two! Ed.) in the Croatian public sector’s IT, according to the organisers of the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention.

This is not the first time that Mr Josipović has shown his support for open source and open standards (posts passim)
Be careful on Skype, Microsoft is reading your texts

15/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech
Anyone who uses Skype, has agreed that Skype may also read their text messages too. Heise Security has found out that Microsoft, which bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, actually avails itself of this right. At the very least https URLs sent via the chat interface receive an unannounced visit from Redmond some time later.

Heise was alerted to this by a reader who pointed out that unusual network traffic was reported after a Skype chat with colleagues. The server logs pointed to a possible replay attack. As things turned out, a Redmond IP address had accessed the https URLs that had previously been sent. The Heise Security re-enacted the situation, sending each other URLs: one of the test https URLs contained login information; the other pointed to a private file sharing cloud service. A few hours after posting the team spotted the following in the the server log files:
```
65.52.100.214 - - [30/Apr/2013:19:28:32 +0200]
 "HEAD /.../login.html?user=tbtest&password=geheim HTTP/1.1"
```
Heise Security too had received a visit from an IP address registered to Microsoft. Some readers reported in the comments that Microsoft also monitors http URLs.

When challenged about this behaviour, the company asserted that messages are scanned to filter out links to spam and phishing pages. However, the facts do not support this assertion: spam and phishing sites don’t normally lurk behind https URLs and Skype didn’t touch those. Furthermore, Skype is sending out head requests, which only the server’s retrieve administration data. Skype would have to examine the content of pages to investigate web pages for spam or phishing.

Heise’s conclusion is that anyone who uses Skype must only agree that Microsoft can use all the data transferred almost as it feels inclined to do. It must be assumed that this actually occurs and that the company will not reveal exactly what it is doing with this data.

As far back as 2008, The H Online, Heise’s English language news site, had previously drawn attention to potential eavesdropping in Skype.

Anyone concerned about their privacy and the security of their own data is therefore advised to switch their communications to a client using the open source XMMP (formerly known as Jabber) protocol and free chat programs that support it.
ISS migrates to Linux

09/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Laptops for crew use on the International Space Station (ISS) are being migrated from Windows to Linux, the Linux Foundation reports.

International Space Station – now penguin-powered

The reason for the migration, given by Keith Chuvala of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor deeply involved in Space Shuttle and ISS operations was as follows:

We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could.

The laptops will be running Debian and those currently running Scientific Linux, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, will likewise be converted to Debian, according to ZDNet.
Contribute to Wikimedia Commons from your smartphone

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Open Source, Tech

Login screen on the Commons Android app
Wikimedia Commons is a great resource: nearly 17 mn. freely usable media files that anyone can use for any purpose and to which anyone can contribute too!

Making contributions to Wikimedia Commons is also getting easier: it’s now possible to transfer images to the Commons database from an Android or iOS smartphone using a free and advert-free mobile app. Features include the ability to view a stream of your contributions, upload multiple files and export to Commons using – if you’re on Android – that phone’s share functionality. Your images will also be tagged with the GPS co-ordinates if GPS tagging is turned on.

Wikimedia points out that by uploading your files to Commons, contributors will be doing more than if they just shared them with friends: they’ll be contributing the goal of spreading free knowledge around the world and sharing their work with billions of Wikipedia readers around the world (Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world. Ed.).

The Android app is available from Google Play, whilst the Apple Store features the iOS app.

The developers also hope to add more features in future and make it easier to browse and discover all the great content Commons has to offer.

The app development team would like you to report any bugs, as well as giving them your suggestions for new features.
LibreOffice 4.0.3 RC3 released

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

The third release candidate (RC) for LibreOffice 4.0.3 is now available for download for evaluation and testing, etc.

As usual, the development team stress that using LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes is not recommended.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

Potential users are also advised to consult the Releases Notes.

When you visit the download page, it will try to detect the visitor’s system and offer the visitor the right download automatically, but may not succeed in all cases.

People who are interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development are advised to try the nightly builds. However, those are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and have not been approved in any way by a quality assurance process. Caveat emptor.
“Rock solid” Debian 7 released

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
On 4th May, Debian made the following announcement concerning the release of Debian 7.0, the latest stable release of this venerable Linux distribution.
After many months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 7.0 (code name “Wheezy”).

This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer and a complete set of
multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories.

Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for Wheezy, will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically.

The installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too.

In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for Secure Boot yet.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:
With this broad selection of packages, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, or storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian’s archive ensure that Wheezy fulfils the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release. It is rock solid and rigorously tested.

You can install Debian on computers ranging from handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of nine architectures are supported: 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), Intel Itanium (ia64), IBM S/390 (31-bit s390 and 64-bit s390x) and ARM EABI (armel for older hardware and armhf for newer hardware using hardware floating-point).

Want to give it a try?
If you want to simply try it without having to install it, you can use a special image, known as a live image, available for CDs, USB sticks, and netboot set-ups. Initially, these images are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures only. It is also possible to use these live images to install Debian. More information is available from the Debian Live homepage.

If, instead, you want to directly install it, you can choose among various installation media, such as Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks, or from the network. Several desktop environments – GNOME, KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, Xfce, and LXDE – may be installed through CD images; the desired one may be chosen from the boot menus of the CDs/DVDs. In addition, multi-architecture CDs and DVDs are available which support installation of multiple architectures from a single disc. Or you can always create bootable USB installation media (see the Installation Guide for more details).

The installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent (the recommended method), jigdo, or HTTP; see Debian on CDs for further information. Wheezy will soon be available on physical DVD, CD-ROM, and Blu-ray Discs from numerous vendors, too.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade?
Upgrades to Debian 7.0 from the previous release, Debian 6.0 (codenamed “Squeeze”), are automatically handled by the apt-get package management tool for most configurations. As always, Debian systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release notes as well as the installation guide for possible issues and for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading. The release notes will be further improved and translated [in]to additional languages in the weeks after the release.
I’ve been using Wheezy on my laptop since release candidate 1 and can testify to it being rock solid and reliable. In particular, the screen display seems much more stable than it ever did under Ubuntu. Indeed the only problems I had with installing Wheezy were getting the wifi working (simply a matter of downloading and installing the correct firmware for the Broadcom chip on the card) and forgetting to install such little extras as libdvdcss2 so I could watch DVDs.

Why have I changed from Ubuntu? Unfortunately, the long-term support (updates) for the version I was running (10.0.4) runs out this month and subsequent versions have switched to the Unity desktop (not my favourite). I still regard Ubuntu as a great distribution, especially for beginners, to whom I’d recommend it for ease of use. Furthermore, for those who dislike Unity, there’s always the KDE-based Kubuntu, of course… 🙂
libwww released 20 years ago today

30/04/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The H Online reminds us that 20 years ago CERN in Geneva gave Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau official permission to release the libwww library free of charge, according to Berners-Lee, “to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint”.

Since then this act of altruism on the part of CERN has had a profound effect on the world of communications. libwww (Library World Wide Web) is a highly modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, as well as being the name of the reference implementation of this API. It can be used for both large and small applications, including web browsers/editors, robots and batch tools.

Its more modern replacement is considered to be libcurl.

You can read more about libwww on Wikipedia.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Recommended software: Tor Browser Bundle

27/04/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

If you’re interested in safe, secure internet browsing, you’ll be interested in the Tor Browser Bundle.

Tor itself is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the internet. As a user, Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your internet connection from learning what sites you visit; it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location and it lets you access sites which are blocked. For more information about Tor, read the project’s overview page.

Tor Browser Bundle in action. I was in Bristol. The IP address resolves to San Donato Milanese in Italy.

The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Linux, Mac OS X or Windows without the need to install any software. all you need to do is unzip the package for your particular OS, and it’s ready to use. The Tor Browser bundle can run off a USB flash drive, is self-contained and comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity.

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