Show Notes: linuxactionnews.com/240

The post Linux Action News 240 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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— Show Notes: —

Brought to you by: Linux Academy

NextCloud 11

• Nextcloud 11 sets new standard for security and scalability – Nextcloud

This release introduces significant security improvements, attested by NCC Group, a global expert in cyber security and risk mitigation to “complement the existing security architecture” and “enhance the general standing of the security working environment.“

New security capabilities include:

• Support for cutting edge browser security features CSP 3.0 and Same-site Cookies* Support for Kerberos authentication and Two-factor Authentication providers based on Universal 2nd Factor and Time-based One-Time Password* Expanded brute force protection to all API access points* More secure Federation through use of SSL/TLS* Our new app store automatically checks apps and enforces signatures

Scalability is a prime concern among our large enterprise customers. This release decreases database load by up to 80% and improves response time by up to 60% for common server operations. Combined with multi-bucket Object Store support, improved handling of previews and Collabora Online speed improvements Nextcloud 11 enables scaling to greater numbers of users and files, decreases the server load and improves the user experience.

Nextcloud 11 introduces Apache Solr powered Full Text Search, enabling users to find words or phrases in text, pdf and common office documents on internal, external, shared and encrypted storage. The next generation Federation technology introduces a central lookup server, enabling Nextcloud users to find each other irrespective of the server their account resides on. The experimental Spreed app integrates secure, peer to peer audio and video chat in Nextcloud.

How to Install from a SNAP

This Nextcloud snap is available in the store for release series 16 (e.g. Ubuntu 16.04).

$ sudo snap install nextcloud

• Nextcloud 11 Snap

$ sudo snap install –candidate nextcloud

Or if you already have it installed (not recommended for production systems):

$ sudo snap refresh –candidate nextcloud

• Nextcloud: the most active open source file sync and share project!* – Nextcloud

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

Uber’s new Self Driving Cars, Run Linux

Uber is expanding its self-driving pilot to San Francisco, giving Bay Area residents the first taste of a driverless future. Anyone who hails an UberX could find themselves in the backseat of one of Uber’s self-driving Volvo XC90 SUVs.

Desktop App Pick

Hiri Email Client

Hiri is an email client that helps you master the art of email.

A complete replacement for Microsoft Outlook

Emails
Tasks
Calendars
Contacts

Collaborate with up to 10 members of your team for free. You can see our pricing here.
https://www.hiri.com/pricing/

Spotlight

Piler open source email archiving

Email archiving provides lots of benefits to your company. Piler is a feature rich open source email archiving solution, and a viable alternative to commercial email archiving products; check out the comparison with Mailarchiva.

Piler has a nice GUI written in PHP supporting several authentication methods (AD/LDAP, SSO, Google OAuth, 2 FA, IMAP, POP3). Be sure to try the online demo!

Piler supports

• archiving and retention rules
• legal hold
• deduplication
• digital fingerprinting and verification
• full text search
• tagging emails
• view, export, restore emails
• bulk import/export messages
• audit logs
• Google Apps
• Office 365
• and many more

• installation-service – piler open source email archiving

Chris’ Personal YouTube Channel – MeetBSD and Behind the Scenes Noah Vist Videos Soon

— NEWS —

0-days hitting Fedora and Ubuntu open desktops to a world of hurt

The zero-day exploits, which Evans published on Tuesday, are the latest to challenge the popular conceit that Linux, at least in its desktop form

• Security Bulletin: Multiple vulnerabilities in the NVIDIA Windows GPU Display Driver kernel mode layer (nvlddmkm.sys) handler for DxgDdiEscape and a vulnerability in the Linux GPU Display Driver kernel mode layer (nvidia.ko) | NVIDIA

Ubuntu 17.04 Swaps Swap Partitions for Swap Files

Canonical’s Dimitri John Ledkov announced today that **Ubuntu 17.04 will use Swap files by default **on non-LVM installs (which if you just click through the installer, is the default setting).

Open-Source Warsow Game Development Appears To End

The Warsow video game was powered by the Qfusion engine, which they evolved into an advanced version of the open-source Quake II code. Thus it was a GPL game engine while their artwork ended up being under the Creative Commons. While it was one of the better open-source FPS video games and saw routine updates — along with passing Steam Greenlight a few years back — it looks like it’s now game over.

Microsoft Office Ribbon UI Is Coming to LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.3 hides a hidden, Microsoft Office-style ‘Ribbon’ interface — but we’reg going to show you how to enable it.

Feedback:

Ask Noah

1-877-347-0011

Mail Bag

• Name: Alex S.

• Subject: School Presentation

• Message:

Hey Noah and/or Chris,
So I have an anxiety disorder that make giving presentations a bit dangerous for me (think, passing out and bashing your face into things) so I get accommodations from my university’s RCPD that basically just add a little legal weight to any discussions I have with teachers to set up alternatives to giving presentations. This semester one of my teachers is allowing me to make a slide deck of the research I did and record me giving the presentation in audio only and turn that in rather than actually presenting in front of the class.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage the recording side of things since I run Linux exclusively so none of the teacher’s suggestions would work but then I remembered you guys talking about OBS and thought, since it’s in the AUR, I’d just install it and see if it could do what I needed.

AND IT DOES! It’s exactly what I need for my final presentation and I only knew it existed because you guys talked about it so I just wanted to say thanks! It’s not the first recommendation I’ve gotten from LAS but it is the first one that helps me with school work.
So, yeah, thanks again for the (indirect) help.

• Name: Stefan R

• Subject: Arch Help

• Message:

Hey there Chris and Noah,

since I heard that Noah finally switched to Arch (Antergos) I decided it was time to ask this question.

How did you get hybrid graphics to work?

I have a nice 17,3″ ASUS Laptop (Intel i5-5200U, Nvidia 920M, Samsung SSD) which works just fine with every Linux-distro I’ve thrown at it so far, but the only thing that seems to work only on Ubuntu is the graphics switching.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu Mate (which it’s running now), but I’d rather have it run a rolling distro.

I simply cannot get it to work properly and trust me, I’ve tried everything:

• Arch Wiki
• Antergos Wiki
• Ubuntu Wiki

• forums

• opensource drivers

• proprietary drivers
• bumblebee
• prime
• lts-kernel + lts-drivers
• cutting edge kernel + cutting edge drivers

and ran into all sorts of problems:

• bumblebee is working with os-drivers, but steam does not start
• bumblebee is working with proprietary-drivers, but steam does not start
• no drivers are working
• steam does start, but only on Intel graphics

I’d like it to work like in Ubuntu where you choose the card in Nvidia-XServer-Settings, logout and log back in.

Thank you for your help and greetings from Austria (no Chris it’s not Australia)
thefenriswolf

Catch the show LIVE SUNDAY:

• Noon Pacific
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— CHRIS’ STASH —

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The post High on NextCloud | LAS 448 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

A potential solution to Ransomware, the 15 year bug that cost CitiGroup $7 Million dollars, Dropbox’s new middle out compression & another flaw that affects all versions of Windows.

Plus your questions, our answers, a packed roundup & more!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

CitiGroup hit with $7 million fine over software bug dating back to 1999

• CitiGroup, a large US Financial institution, is being fined for failing to properly report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
• According to the SEC, the error [PDF] resulted in the financial regulator being sent incomplete “blue sheet” information for a remarkable 15 years – from May 1999 to April 2014.
• The bank was required to send details of all stock transactions, and due to a bug, a number of branches were never included in those reports
• The details are quite amusing
• “The mistake was discovered by Citigroup itself when it was asked to send a large but precise chunk of trading data to the SEC in April 2014 and asked its technical support team to help identify which internal ID numbers they should run a request on.”
• “That team quickly noticed that some branches’ trades were not being included in the automated system and alerted those above them. Four days later a patch was in place, but it wasn’t until eight months later that the company received a formal report noting that the error had affected SEC reports going back more than a decade. The next month, January 2015, Citigroup fessed up to the SEC.”
• “It turned out that the error was a result of how the company introduced new alphanumeric branch codes. When the system was introduced in the mid-1990s, the program code filtered out any transactions that were given three-digit branch codes from 089 to 100 and used those prefixes for testing purposes.”
• So any transaction with a branch code in that range, was considered test data, and not reported to the government
• “But in 1998, the company started using alphanumeric branch codes as it expanded its business. Among them were the codes 10B, 10C and so on, which the system treated as being within the excluded range, and so their transactions were removed from any reports sent to the SEC.”
• “The SEC routinely sends requests to financial institutions asking them to send all details on transactions between specific dates as a way of checking that nothing untoward is going on. The coding error had resulted in Citigroup failing to send information on 26,810 transactions in over 2,300 such requests.”
• “The SEC was not impressed and said in a statement announcing the fine that the “failure to discover the coding error and to produce the missing data for many years potentially impacted numerous Commission investigations.””
• “Broker-dealers have a core responsibility to promptly provide the SEC with accurate and complete trading data for us to analyze during enforcement investigations,” said Robert Cohen, co-chief of the SEC enforcement division’s market abuse unit. “Citigroup did not live up to that responsibility for an inexcusably long period of time, and it must pay the largest penalty to date for blue sheet violations.”
• 7 Million seems like a relatively small fine for such a large screw up, but it does not appear to have been malicious.

New system to detect ransomware by looking at filesystem patterns

• “Our system is more of an early-warning system. It doesn’t prevent the ransomware from starting … it prevents the ransomware from completing its task … so you lose only a couple of pictures or a couple of documents rather than everything that’s on your hard drive, and it relieves you of the burden of having to pay the ransom,” said Nolen Scaife, a UF doctoral student and founding member of UF’s Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research.
• “Attacks most often show up in the form of an email that appears to be from someone familiar. The recipient clicks on a link in the email and unknowingly unleashes malware that encrypts his or her data. The next thing to appear is a message demanding the ransom, typically anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.”
• “It’s an incredibly easy way to monetize a bad use of software,” said Patrick Traynor, an associate professor in UF’s department of computer and information science and engineering at UF and also a member of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research. He and Scaife worked together on developing CryptoDrop.
• “We ran our detector against several hundred ransomware samples that were live,” Scaife said, “and in those case it detected 100 percent of those malware samples and it did so after only a median of 10 files were encrypted.”
• “About one-tenth of 1 percent of the files were lost,” Traynor said, “but the advantage is that it’s flexible. We don’t have to wait for that anti-virus update. If you have a new version of your ransomware, our system can detect that.”
• Video – Extortion extinction: Ransomware
  
• It seems like it would be fairly trivial to detect the pattern that ransomware uses. I imagine most ransomware creates a new file, named original.ext.locked and then encrypts the contents of the original file, then removes the original
• It is possible newer ransomware could use new patterns, like renaming files and overwriting in place, or encrypting files in random order instead of walking the directory tree to make it harder to detect
• Additional Coveragge: Phys.org

Dropbox open sources Lepton image compression algorithm, save 22% by losslessly compressing JPEGs

• “Lepton achieves a 22% savings reduction for existing JPEG images, by predicting coefficients in JPEG blocks and feeding those predictions as context into an arithmetic coder. Lepton preserves the original file bit-for-bit perfectly. It compresses JPEG files at a rate of 5 megabytes per second and decodes them back to the original bits at 15 megabytes per second, securely, deterministically, and in under 24 megabytes of memory.”
• Speed seems very slow, compression is 5 MB/s, and decompression is 15 MB/s
• It is not clear if the encoding can be multithreaded across many cores to increase speed, like xz can do. Even without that, in most cases you would be dealing with many image files at once, but even compressing many files at once, that is quite slow
• “We have used Lepton to encode 16 billion images saved to Dropbox, and are rapidly recoding our older images. Lepton has already saved Dropbox multiple petabytes of space.”
• The article has a very good description of how JPEG encoding works
• “The DC coefficient (brightness in each 8×8 block) takes up a lot of room (over 8%) in a typical iPhone photograph so it’s important to compress it well. Most image formats put the DC coefficients before any AC coefficients in the file format. Lepton gets a compression advantage by coding the DC as the last value in each block. Since the DCs are serialized last, there is a wealth of information from the AC coefficients available to predict the DC coefficient. By defining a good and reproducible prediction, we can subtract the actual DC coefficient from the predicted DC coefficient, and only encode the delta. Then in the future we can use the prediction along with the saved delta to get the original DC coefficient. In almost all cases, this technique results in a significantly reduced number of symbols to feed into our arithmetic coder.”
• “Lepton can decompress significantly faster than line-speed for typical consumer and business connections. Lepton is a fully streamable format, meaning the decompression can be applied to any file as that file is being transferred over the network. Hence, streaming overlaps the computational work of the decompression with the file transfer itself, hiding latency from the user.”
• Because it can be streamed, this means that mobile devices could work via a proxy, that compresses all JPEG content before transmitting it to the mobile device, then an application on the mobile device could decompression it and display the resulting JPEG

Flaw in Windows Printing subsystem affects all versions of Windows

• “A remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Windows Print Spooler service does not properly validate print drivers while installing a printer from servers. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could use it to execute arbitrary code and take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.”
• “Most organizations try to apply the principle of least privilege to the devices in their networks. This works pretty well for things like laptops or desktops since the hardware they use doesn’t change that often. However printers are a bit different. While they still need drivers, printers need to support virtually any user that wants to connect to them. As end-users move through a building, they naturally want to use the printer closest to them. Mobile users expect to be able to easily connect and use a printer when they come into the office. In addition, most organizations don’t standardize on a single printer, and will have multiple models and manufacturers often within a single network.”
• “So instead of having system administrators push all possible printer drivers to all workstations in the network, the solution was to develop a way to deliver the driver to a user device right before the printer is used. And this is where Point-and-Print showed up. This approach stores a shared driver on the printer or print server, and only the users of that printer receive the driver that they need. At first glance, this is a practical and simple solution to driver deployment. The user gets access to the printer driver they need without requiring an administrator – a nice win-win.”
• “By default, in corporate networks, network admins allow printers to deliver the necessary drivers to workstations connected to the network. These drivers are silently installed without any user interaction and run under the SYSTEM user, with all the available privileges.”
• The researchers managed to dissect a firmware update for an existing printer, and modify it to infect Windows clients that load its driver with malware
• The malware allowed them access to the target Windows client, as the SYSTEM user
• They detail a number of other ways this vulnerability could be exploited:
• Watering hole attacks:
• Backdooring an existing printer or printer server.
• Microsoft print server: driver path: c:\windows\system32\spool\drivers*\3...
• Linux/BSD cups server: check for share driver print$ in the configuration.
• Multiple vendors support Point-and-Print on the printer itself
• Re-flash printer with backdoored drivers.
• Create a fake print server and broadcast with auto discovery.
• Privilege escalation:
• Use the add printer as a privileged escalation mechanism to get system access.
• Mitm attack to the printer and inject the backdoored driver instead of the real one.
• Going more global with IPP and Webpnp. Send users email with a link, when clicked, it attempts to connect to the (fake?) printer in question, and results in the driver being installed on the target computer
• There is more detail in the blog post about infecting a computer remotely
• Researcher blog post
• Microsoft released a fix for this vulnerability as part of the July patch Tuesday
• Official Microsoft Bulletin
• Additional Coverage: softpedia

Feedback:

• How secure is the passphrase?

• FreeNAS On the Go

• https://www.zfsbook.com — FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS

Round Up:

• Microsoft wins landmark appeal over seizure of foreign emails
• Over 6000 redis installs found exposed directly to the Internet with no authentication
• Comcast Expands Usage Caps
• From the researcher who brought us the MD5 collision story last week, “Bypass AllTheThings”, 5 Application Whitelisting bypasses for Windows in one binary
• BitTorrent Launches News Network at Republican Convention
• Sega Saturn DRM cracked, 23 years after launch. Play games from USB
• MIT’s anonymous online communications protocol Riffle could beat Tor at its own game
• NBC/Universal patents new way to detect bittorrent swarms. Originally applied for in 2009, not clear if the technology is current or useful
• Tor Project, a Digital Privacy Group, Reboots With New Board
• New password reuse checking tool. Enter your username and password and see which sites it is reused on.
• Terms of Mozilla/Yahoo deal from 2014 say that if Yahoo is sold, and Mozilla doesn’t like the new owner, they still get paid $375 million/year until 2019, even if they switch search/advertising to someone else
• WebhostingTalk.com and other forums breached, databases for same on underground forum
• Database left open to internet with no authentication, researcher able to access images of various doors, locks, RFID access panels, and the controller board of an alarm system

The post Ending Ransomware | TechSNAP 275 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The crew took the Firefox challenge & we follow up, we reflect on 10 years of Firefox, their early Linux support & the growing competition from Webkit.

Gnome raised money to defend it’s Trademark from Groupon, which has quickly raised the white flag. Is this instant groundswell of support the dawn of a new community attitude towards Gnome?

Plus an exciting first live on the show, tons of great feedback & more!

Thanks to:

• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

Pre-Show:

• Amazon Echo Parody – YouTube

FU:

• How to fix the vsync issues with Nvidia cards

• Cheap Linux USB Headphones?

• Most persuasive features for potential switchers?

• Fedora Next – delayed but awesome.

Firefox Challange Follow Up

• I’m taking the Firefox Challenge, and I crash too

Celebrating 10 Years of Firefox | The Mozilla Blog

10 years ago we built Firefox to give you a choice. The Web was a monoculture and the only way in was through the company that controlled your operating system. We believed then, and so did many of you, that the Web deserved an independent alternative. Today hundreds of millions of people trust Firefox because they understand that we’re different; that our independence lets us put you first.

Mozilla Introduces ‘Forget Button’ for Firefox and Dev Edition Browser

With a huge developer user base, Mozilla’s new Firefox Developer Edition browser looks to provide an all-in-one debugging toolset for professi

While it’s loosely based around the previous Firefox Aurora builds, it’s not a straight-forward rebrand — it’s closer to the nightly builds, but built for a developer user base with different needs. It also removes a lot of the safeguards that are vital in the consumer browser but that can frustrate developers.

Chromium:

• The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the BSD license,[18] with other parts being subject to a variety of different open-source licenses, including the MIT License, the LGPL, the Ms-PL and an MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license

• Chromium (web browser) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  

  Differences from Google Chrome

Chromium is the name given to the open-source project and the browser source code released and maintained by the Chromium Project.[7] It is possible to download the source code and build it manually on many platforms. To create Chrome from Chromium, Google takes this source code and adds:[8]

• A restriction blocking the installation of extensions from anywhere other than the Chrome Web Store[9]
• Integrated Flash Player[10] (proprietary license and code)
• Built-in print preview and print system
• The Google and Google Chrome names (both trademarked)[11][12][13]
• An auto-update system called GoogleUpdate (some, such as the Debian or Ubuntu community builds of chromium, rely on the package management system of the OS as an alternative)
• An opt-in option for users to send Google their usage statistics and crash reports
• RLZ tracking when Chrome is downloaded as part of marketing promotions and distribution partnerships. This transmits information in encoded form to Google, including both when—and from where—Chrome was downloaded. In June 2010, Google confirmed that the RLZ tracking token is not present in versions of Chrome downloaded from the Google website directly, nor in any version of Chromium. The RLZ source code was also made open source at the same time (previously it was proprietary—and although the source is now open the feature was not migrated to Chromium) so that developers can confirm what it is and how it works.[14]

By default, Chromium only supports Vorbis, Theora and WebM codecs for the HTML5 audio and video tags. Google Chrome supports these as well as the patent-encumbered AAC and MP3 codecs. On 11 January 2011, the Chrome Product manager, Mike Jazayeri, announced that Chrome would no longer support the H.264 video format for its HTML5 player.[15] In October 2013 Cisco announced that it was open-sourcing its H.264 codecs and will cover all fees required.[16] As of December 2013, Chrome still supports H.264. Linux distributions that distribute Chromium may add support for other codecs to their customized versions of Chromium.

Gnome Vs Groupon

• Help the GNOME Foundation defend the GNOME trademark

Recently Groupon announced a product with the same product name as GNOME. Groupon’s product is a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation.” The GNOME community was shocked that Groupon would use our mark for a product so closely related to the GNOME desktop and technology. It was almost inconceivable to us that Groupon, with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, a full legal team and a huge engineering staff would not have heard of the GNOME project, found our trademark registration using a casual search, or even found our website, but we nevertheless got in touch with them and asked them to pick another name. Not only did Groupon refuse, but it has now filed even more trademark applications (the full list of applications they filed can be found here, here and here). To use the GNOME name for a proprietary software product that is antithetical to the fundamental ideas of the GNOME community, the free software community and the GNU project is outrageous. Please help us fight this huge company as they try to trade on our goodwill and hard earned reputation.

• Groupon respond to ‘Defend GNOME’ critisism

• Sri Viswanath the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations at Groupon just posted

MATE 14.04 is OUT!

• Ubuntu MATE | Ubuntu MATE

• More Ubuntu MATE coverage for our German members.

• Ubuntu MATE 14.04 Live Release at 1:01:15.

Runs Linux from the people:

• Send in a pic/video of your runs Linux.
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Post-Show:

• Ubuntu Online Summit Starts in Just Two Days

The post Firefox gets Unplugged | LINUX Unplugged 66 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

It’s been one year and we pay up on the Monkey Suit Mir Bet. We chat with Kevin Gunn Engineering Manager for Display Server & Unity UI at Canonical about how closed drivers will work with Mir, how new devices like the Oculus Rift might work, Wayland, and much more.

Plus: Unreal 4 and GOG.com announce incoming Linux support, AMD could be planning some major video driver changes, Ubuntu Tablet rumors…

AND SO MUCH MORE!

All this week on, The Linux Action Show!

Thanks to:

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— Show Notes: —

MIr Chat: Kevin Gunn

Engineering Manager for Display Server & Unity UI at Canonical

Brought to you by: System76

• KevinGunn – Ubuntu Wiki

• What is your involvement with the MIR Project?

• DO you like my hair?

• How do you feel that MIR will hold up to time? We’ve seen how initial decisions with X have impacted its ability to preform as our computing needs have changed. Is MIR being designed with as much forward compatibility as possible?

• Does or will MIR have the ability to be expanded/extended upon with regard to future devices/platforms? Is it monolithic in that it will exist as a single unit, or can it be altered easily for different systems with different goals in mind?

• One of the concerns we’ve heard is that ‘;eventually’ applications will need to be written for MIR, Obviously there is the XMir compatibility layer, but are there plans for a wayland compatibility layer to deal with future Wayland/MIR differences which may creep up over time.

• How do you feel MIR will perform as a display server over the next, say, 10 years? Do you believe it will fair better than X has over the past 10 years?

• Can you give me a better picture of how closed source drivers will work with Mir?

• Will I be able to do ssh with x forwarding from a computer running Mir. Will I be able to do something like ssh -X to a computer running Mir from a computer running X? From a computer running Mir?

• And much more!

2013 Followup: our milestones effectively match this line of thought

• Launching Mir & UnityNext

• Its like a 3 stage rocket for Mir & Unity Next…

• First target is integration of Unity Next & Mir (we’ll be discussing this at the upcoming UDS)….

• second is actually creating our Ubuntu for Phone with Unity Next + Mir sometime in 4Q13. Lastly we should hit full convergence in 2Q 2014.

– Picks –

Runs Linux:

• Indian Banks switching to Linux, rather than taking extended Windows XP Support

Desktop App Pick

• Viber – Free calls, Free text messages, photo and location sharing

• AUR (en) – viber

• Viber – Google Play

• Viber on the App Store

• On February 13, 2014, Rakuten announced they had acquired Viber for $900 million

• Viber – Privacy Policy

• Viber founder: ‘People should be concerned about privacy’ | Technology | theguardian.com

Viber’s policy is that if it receives a proper subpoena, it will provide records of who made and received calls, and when, but that no content from those conversations will be shared.

He says Viber does not “have the capability to listen to conversations”. Messages are stored, for two weeks or until they are opened by the recipient, whichever is shorter. Around 80% are deleted in less than a second.

Weekly Spotlight

• If Mir fails within one year from now, I’ll wear this on the show (Matt)

• Matt Makes the Bet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsTQc0ME1eo&feature=youtu.be&t=24m56s

— NEWS —

First Ubuntu Tablets To Launch This Autumn

“[Tablets] will arrive pretty much simultaneously with phones. Q3, middle of this year we’ll see both phones and tablets running Ubuntu on the market.”

GOG.com Soon On More Platforms

No, don’t duck. This is actually good news. We just wanted to announce that, after much deliberation, **we’ve decided that one of the next steps for us is to support Linux.

We’re initially going to be launching our Linux support on GOG.com with the full GOG.com treatment for Ubuntu and Mint.

Getting geared up for a big kick-off in the fall with at least 100 Linux games ready for you to play.

This is, of course, going to include games that we sell which already have Linux clients, but we’ll also be bringing Linux gamers a variety of classics that are, for the first time, officially supported and maintained by a storefront like ours.

Unreal Engine 4 to Support Linux with Monthly Sub for Devs

For $19/month you can have access to everything, including the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine’s complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development.

We’re working to build a company that succeeds when UE4 developers succeed. Anyone can ship a commercial product with UE4 by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users. If your game makes $1,000,000, then we make $50,000. We realize that’s a lot to ask, and that it would be a crazy proposition unless UE4 enables you to build way better games way more productively than otherwise!

This first release of Unreal Engine 4 is just the beginning. In the C++ code, you can see many new initiatives underway, for example to support Oculus VR, Linux, Valve’s Steamworks and Steam Box efforts, and deployment of games to web browsers via HTML5.

The All New Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 (DK2) Virtual Reality Headset to Ship with Linux Support

The Oculus Rift and the Oculus SDK currently support Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Debian Project Leader canidate proposes PPA system

It’s again that time of the year for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader! Starting on March 31st, and during the following two weeks, the Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year.

Among this year’s candidates there is the current DPL, Lucas Nussbaum, who admits that “the workload involved in being the DPL is just huge,”

In his platform, Lucas speaks of technical and social steps to improve the project: from reproducible builds for a more secure archive to a renewed effort to run Debian on new platforms (especially smartphone and tablets); from a more welcoming approach to prospective contributors to an easier collaboration with organizations.

Neil McGovern. Neil’s platform focuses mainly on the need to “ensure that we cater to our users, and there’s millions of them. From those running the latest software in unstable, to people who simply want a rock solid core release.”

In his opinion “the size of Debian is increasing, and will reach a point where we’re unable to guarantee basic compatibility with other packages, or the length of time it takes to do so becomes exponentially longer, unless something changes.” To fix this problem, Neil proposes the implementation of PPAs (Personal Package Archives), the modernisation of the current build and infrastructure system as well as generally supporting the various teams.

AMD Is Exploring A Very Interesting, More-Open Linux Driver Strategy .

The short answer of what AMD’s trying to do is seeing about leveraging the existing (with modifications) open-source Radeon (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel driver underneath the closed-source Catalyst driver.

– Feedback: –

• Bob’s development blog: Why the display server doesn’t matter

Display servers are the component in the display stack that seems to hog a lot of the limelight. I think this is a bit of a mistake, as it’s actually probably the least important component, at least to a user.

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Straw Poll: Should LAS Drop “Seasons” post Episode 300?

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The post Mir Monkey Business | LAS s31e05 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Valve has announced SteamOS, and we have our analysis of how this will impact the Linux ecosystem at large, the challenge Valve faces, and the reasons Valve is the right company to pull this effort off.

Plus the real reason for iTunes, re-thinking Google, and a lot more!

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— Show Notes: —

FU

• Re-Thinking Google

• blackoutworm 1 day ago RE: Why does anyone NEED iTunes?

The only reason I would need iTunes on linux is for streaming tv shows.
Netflix and amazon\’s library is peanuts compared to itunes. Itunes has a lot of exclusives. Meaning shows that aren\’t and will probably never be released to dvd or bluray. As a linux user, I really hate that there\’s little to no DRM support here.

Can\’t get it working. Nor mp4s bought from my ipad. I really wish that\’ll change. As far as digital media go, linux is 10 years behind.

— SteamOS Annouced: Linux for the Living Room —

• The Steam Universe is Expanding in 2014

Last year, we shipped a software feature called Big Picture, a user-interface tailored for televisions and gamepads.
This year we\’ve been working on even more ways to connect the dots for customers who want Steam in the living-room.
Soon, we\’ll be adding you to our design process, so that you can help us shape the future of Steam.

• An XBMC like distro, based on Ubuntu 12.04

SteamOS will primarily be based off Ubuntu, as it has been Valve\’s focus ever since they started testing Steam for Linux. They already have a repository for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS users designated \”hometest\”, which is obviously short for SteamOS being tested in people\’s homes. This hometest repository has been around since April.

+ This will create a \"Steam standard\" that non-Steam distros can follow to garuntee compatability. 

• 30% of Steam Games have Controller Support

While 40 percent of all Linux games on Steam feature some form of controller support, that only amounts to 72 games total that are currently set up to work on a living room box running SteamOS

When Big Picture mode was launched last September, 23.7 percent of the games available on Steam were listed with full or partial controller support (382 games total). Of the games that have launched on Steam since then, about 48.4 percent have featured full or partial controller support (raising the total proportion of games in this category on Steam to 29.4 percent or 617 games total).

• SteamOS will stream games from Windows PCs

Not unlike the Nvidia Shield, it will include a method for wirelessly streaming games from your existing gaming computer to your TV, which Valve says will also come to the regular Steam client at some point in the future.

• Steam – ~60 million users
• XBox Live – 46 million users as of February 2013

• PlayStation Network – +100 million

• The dawn of a new \”Linux\”. Valve could change the meaning of Linux from \”scary to the average joe\” to the market saviour, open in the same sense of the \”internet\” being open and allowing for commerce.

Mail Sack:

• Response to the Downside of Arch
• Regarding Windows
• SteamOS vs. the joke of the Edge

The post Full SteamOS Ahead | LINUX Unplugged 7 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Can two of the hottest sync systems live in harmony? We’ll compare SpiderOak and Bittorrent Sync, and see if we can use each for it’s specific strengths.

Plus: Intel and XMir drama, developers plea for the end of DirectX, your emails…

AND SO MUCH MORE!

All this week on, The Linux Action Show!

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