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LWN.net is a comprehensive source of news and opinions from
and about the Linux community. This is the main LWN.net feed,
listing all articles which are posted to the site front page.
URL: http://lwn.net
Updated: 4 hours 55 min ago
GNU/Linux powers state-of-the-art hearing aid research
64 Studio Ltd. has created a Linux distribution for HörTech gGmbH to
aid in research on hearing impairment and augmentation technology.
"64 Studio was commissioned by HörTech to create a GNU/Linux
real-time audio distribution, code-named Mahalia, optimized for the Lenovo
Thinkpad X200 notebook. Giso Grimm of the Carl von Ossietzky-Universität
Oldenburg explained: "We prefer to use ready-to-use Linux audio
distributions over patching the kernel ourselves, since our expertise is in
signal processing, not kernel development. When we were faced with the fact
that our then favourite audio distribution failed to deliver stable
real-time kernels for several releases, we asked 64 Studio to tailor us a
customized distribution with a working real-time kernel that matched our
specific needs and ran stable on the selected hardware.""
Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released
Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) beta is available for testing. The Ubuntu
10.10 family of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu,
have also reached beta status. Maverick Meerkat is scheduled for a final
release on October 10, 2010.
Security advisories for Friday
Debian has updated barnowl (denial
of service).
Fedora has updated rekonq (F13, F12: cross-site scripting), sssd (F13, F12: authentication bypass), wireshark (F13, F12: multiple vulnerabilities), and F12: kernel (privilege escalation).
Gentoo has updated wxgtk (arbitrary code execution).
Mandriva has updated wget (code execution).
Pardus has updated openssl (denial of service) and flashplugin (multiple vulnerabilities).
Red Hat has updated kernel (privilege escalation).
SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).
Morgan: Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!
On her blog, Mackenzie Morgan reports on efforts to increase the number of women speakers at Ohio LinuxFest. Due to the outreach, the number of women speakers went from five of 31 last year to 14 of 38 this year. "Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.".
Embedded Linux Conference videos available
Michael Opdenacker has announced the availability of videos from this year's Embedded Linux Conference, which was held in San Francisco in April. The slides and Theora video are available for most, if not all, of the talks. Opdenacker and the Free Electrons team do the community a great service by doing the work to record and transcode the videos. "If you are interested in such talks, what about joining the European
edition of the conference? It will take place in Cambridge (UK), on
October 27-28, and will be colocated with the GStreamer conference
(October 26). See http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_europe10/
and http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/conference/ for details."
Thursday's security updates
Mandriva has updated thunderbird (multiple vulnerabilities).
Ubuntu has updated wget (arbitrary code execution).
Vignatti: X Census (for 1.9)
Tiago Vignatti has put together a report on the development X.org 1.9. In the tradition of the kernel statistics reported on LWN, and the more recent GNOME census, he ranks developers and employers based on the number of changes made to various pieces of the X.org tree during the development of 1.9 (April 2 to August 20). The statistics are broken up along functional lines into several categories: X implementation, X input drivers, user space video drivers, Pixman, X11 conformance testing, and X documentation. "Of course lines of code and changeset are far from being a good metric to see actually how the development happened. But still, it does represents something."
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 2, 2010
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 2, 2010 is available.
Welte: More GPL enforcement work again.. and a very surreal but important case
On his blog, Harald Welte writes about work he is doing as part of the gpl-violations.org project. "Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either." If the manufacturer were to succeed with its claims, it could jeopardize many different projects that provide alternate code for devices, he says.
GNOME Journal Issue 21 released
Issue 21 of the GNOME Journal is
out; topics covered include simple real-time games, Grilo, and an interview
with Bradley Kuhn.
Security advisories for Wednesday
CentOS has updated C5: httpd
(multiple vulnerabilities) and C5: kernel
(privilege escalation).
Debian has updated wireshark (arbitrary code execution).
Fedora has updated socat (F13, F12: arbitrary code execution).
Mandriva has updated libgdiplus (arbitrary code execution), perl-libwww-perl (unexpected download filename), and openssl (denial of service).
openSUSE has updated acroread (multiple vulnerabilities).
SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities) and acroread (multiple vulnerabilities).
Duffy: A story about updates and people
On her blog, Máirín Duffy describes four archetypes of Fedora users (Caroline Casual-User, Pamela Packager, Connie Community, and Nancy Ninja) and how they relate to updates of the distribution. Fedora has been discussing its update policy for a bit and Duffy uses the user stories to present her thoughts on how to proceed. "Pamela wants updates to be constant throughout a release, no holds barred — she wants the latest Gimp and she wants it yesterday. Caroline just wants her computer to work — "please don't change a thing — it worked yesterday — if it breaks before my presentation I'm screwed!" Can both their needs be met? I think so! But its easy to completely miss where interests and needs can both be met when the language is so easily interpreted to mean the problem is untenable."
[$] LinuxCon Brazil: Q&A with Linus and Andrew
Linus Torvalds rarely makes appearances at conferences, and it's even
less common for him to get up in front of the crowd and speak. He made an
exception for LinuxCon Brazil, though, where he and Andrew Morton appeared
in a question and answer session led by Linux Foundation director Jim
Zemlin. The resulting conversation covered many aspects of kernel
development, its processes, and its history. Click below (subscribers
only) for the full report from São Paulo.
Debian Project mourns the loss of Frans Pop
The Debian Project has put up a brief notice on the
passing of longtime contributor Frans Pop. "Frans was involved in
Debian as a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port,
and one of the most involved members of the Debian Installer team. He was a
Debian Listmaster, editor and release manager of the Installation Guide and
the release notes, as well as a Dutch translator."
PostgreSQL 9.0 Release Candidate 1
The first release candidate for PostgreSQL 9.0 is available for testing. "No changes in commands, interfaces or APIs are expected between this release candidate and the final version. Applications which will deploy on 9.0 can and should test against 9.0rc1. Depending on bug reports, there may or may not be more release candidates before the final release."
KDE SC 4.5.1 Released
KDE has updated the Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces to 4.5.1.
"This release will make 4.5 users life more pleasant by adding a
number of important bugfixes, bringing more stability and better
functionality to the Plasma Desktop, and many applications and
utilities."
Tuesday's security updates
Debian has updated openssl (denial
of service).
Fedora has updated bogofilter (F13, F12: denial of service) and php-pear-cas (F13, F12: multiple vulnerabilities).
Mandriva has updated libhx (arbitrary code execution).
Ubuntu has updated bogofilter (denial of service) and libwww-perl (unexpected download filename).
[$] A licensing change for syslog-ng
Many have criticized syslog-ng, a replacement for the syslog logging daemon with many additional features, for not being open enough. Syslog-ng has a closed-source commercial version and keeps the entire code base under a single copyright by requiring copyright transfer for contributions, which has been a sore spot in the eyes of many people. This may be part of the cause for syslog-ng failing to become the default system-logging daemon of modern Linux distributions. Now the project seeks to relieve these concerns and attract a wider contributor base with a new licensing model. Subscribers can click below for the full article from this week's Development page.
Hold The Celebrations; H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters (ComputerWorld UK)
Over at ComputerWorld UK, Simon Phipps says there is nothing to celebrate in the recent announcement [PDF] that MPEG-LA will not charge royalties on "web uses" of the H.264 codec for the remaining life of the patents it administers. "First, the H.264-format video needs to be created - but that isn't free under this move. Then it needs to be served up for streaming - but that isn't free under this move. There then needs to be support for decoding it in your browser - but adding that isn't free under this move. Finally it needs to be displayed on your screen. [...] The only part of this sequence being left untaxed is the final one. Importantly, they are not offering to leave the addition of support for H.264 decoding in your browser untaxed. In particular, this means the Mozilla Foundation would have to pay to include the technology in Firefox." He also posits that MPEG-LA may try to join forces with Oracle and Paul Allen's Interval Research to create a three-way patent attack on Google—this time against WebM.
Chromium Graphics Overhaul (The Chromium Blog)
The Chromium blog reports on some developments in graphics handling in the free Google Chrome-based browser. The intent is to speed up graphics rendering by taking advantage of the GPU. "At its core, this graphics work relies on a new process (yes, another one) called the GPU process. The GPU process accepts graphics commands from the renderer process and pushes them to OpenGL or Direct3D (via ANGLE). Normally, renderer processes wouldnt be able to access these APIs, so the GPU process runs in a modified sandbox. Creating a specialized process like this allows Chromiums sandbox to continue to contain as much as possbile: the renderer process is still unable to access the systems graphics APIs, and the GPU process contains less logic."