It was revealed yesterday that Canonical will no longer commercially support Kubuntu, the KDE spin-off to Ubuntu. While still an official Ubuntu derivative, Kubuntu will now only receive the community support of other variants such as Edubuntu and Xubuntu after the release of 12.04.

The Kubuntu project was the first major Ubuntu derivative, starting with a KDE based release of 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog. After 7 years though, the distro has not been as popular as it’s big brother:

“This is a rational business decision,” posted Jonathan Riddell, developer on Kubuntu, “Kubuntu has not been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it.”

Jonathan continued to put out a call for the community to increase their support of the distro.

With Canonical planning to push into the tablet and Smart TV market, as well as their staunch support for Unity across all these platforms, this move does seem like an unfortunate inevitability.

Linux User has reached out to Canonical for comment.

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I think you’ve heard about the piracy happening in the waters surrounding Somalia. Entire ships are captured, and their passengers are often hurt and sometimes even killed.

Interestingly enough, the term often associated with this kind of kidnapping and killing is also frequently used in computing terms for something quite different. Copying something and giving it away for free, without any motive for profit and without taking anything away from the original.

If I were a victim of actual piracy while sailing the seas, I would probably consider the word’s rampant misuse in technology circles as massively insulting. Especially as the victims of the technological form of ‘piracy’ seem to be doing rather well. To protect them against the hideous crimes committed, governments are willing to give up things like privacy and freedom of speech.

Of course, the ‘collateral damage’ done leads to protests. It’s not likely that you missed the SOPA blackout a while ago. For a day, hundreds of websites went black; openSUSE.org joined in with the protests and so did many other FOSS projects. And, not surprisingly, the US Congress, or at least those within it supporting SOPA and similar things, backed off – for now. Freedom mattered more than the costs of ‘piracy’. Going forward, I will use the term ‘copyright infringement’, by the way.

So, good news. The modern, social media-permeated tech world beat the old-style media because it could mobilise people. And if you reach enough people and enough of them care about what you’re saying, you can change things. Freedom is luckily still somewhat important. Unfortunately, when it comes to our fundamental freedoms like communicating privately and without limits, both companies and governments have strong incentives to do the wrong thing and it won’t take long for the next attack to happen.

It is understandable. There are bad things out there – from child pornography to websites spouting crazy things like racism, silly conspiracies around inoculations, scams and much more. And yes, copyright does matter: free software depends on it to be able to go after anyone who is using free code to take users’ rights away.

But some people will always believe crazy things; and copyright lasting well over 60 years is well beyond reasonable and desirable. It’s just not worth it. As The Oatmeal cult online comic put it, SOPA is “like dealing with a lion which escaped from the zoo by blasting some kittens with a flamethrower”. In other words, not only are these measures against copyright infringement woefully inadequate, but they hurt things that we all love.

We are choosing the interests of a specific industry over the interests of society as a whole. While the strict copyright we have might be beneficial to that small industry, it hurts everything else: from universities to companies, from developing countries to developed ones. After all, the more knowledge that is shared, the more new knowledge that is generated. And by putting a tax on the sharing of knowledge, we tax the generation of more knowledge – ultimately limiting economic as well as social growth.

The industries fighting to protect and extend copyright know this, of course. They are losing the fight and, realising that, have resorted to questionable tactics and name-calling. For me that is proof enough that they are wrong. I think we should do anything to stop piracy (actual piracy). I think we should stop going after copyright infringers until the current copyright laws have been adjusted for the world we live in (there is this cool, new thing called ‘the internet’) and the industry which depends on it has ceased using morally questionable tactics to further their financial cause.

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Greg Kroah-Hartman has wasted no time in his new position at the Linux Foundation, revealing the integration of the Android kernel in upcoming kernel version 3.3, as well as announcing the latest stable release of 3.2.4.

Kernel 3.2.4 became available for download on Friday via kernel.org, Greg explained in the accompanying announcement email that the new version fixes a specific build failure from 3.2.3.

Regarding future updates, Greg mentioned in an interview last week with Muktware that the Android kernel will be included in the release of 3.3:

“The 3.3 kernel release will let you boot an Android userspace with no modifications, but not very good power management. The 3.4 kernel release will hopefully have the power management hooks that Android needs in it, along with a few other minor missing infrastructure pieces that didn’t make it into the 3.3 kernel release.”

The inclusion of the Android kernel should eventually allow for a superior working environment for developers, especially when the first x86 based Android devices start being released to the general public.

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Pros: An impressive amount of technology and connectivity crammed into an impossibly small package. The fanless design, modularity, and easily accessible innards.
Cons: fit-PC3′s impressive functionality comes at a price. The most basic model will set you back $328 — and that’s without shipping and VAT.
More info: fit-PC3 homepage

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Right from the start, it’s apparent that fit-PC3 is not your run of the mill computer. The machine itself is really — and we mean really –small. It’s roughly the size of a portable CD player (remember those?). Wrapped in a die-cast housing, fit-PC3 feels solid and robust, and obviously can withstand harsh treatment. Probably the most impressive feature of fit-PC3 is its fanless design, where the entire housing acts as a giant heat sink. This is, indeed, a marvel of thermal design which ensures that even under heavy load fit-PC3 never gets uncomfortably hot.

Considering its diminutive size, fit-PC3 is not a bad performer. The machine is powered by an AMD G-series Embedded Fusion APU featuring a dual-core 64-bit processor and Radeon HD 6xxxx GPU combo. Our particular model came with an AMD G-T40E 1.0GHz processor and a Radeon HD6250 graphics card, backed up by 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM. While this is not the most powerful fit-PC3 configuration available, it handled pretty much all the tasks we threw at it with aplomb.

fit-PC3 is available in several configurations. Our model featured 4GB RAM, a Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n card, a 4 USB FACE module (more about this later), and no hard disk. The most basic model — called fit-PC3 Value Barebone — comes with no embellishments at all, so you have to add RAM, a hard disk, a wireless card and other components yourself. Thanks to the well thought-out design, stuffing fit-PC3 with additional components or upgrading existing parts is an absolute breeze. To access the hard disk bay, you need to remove one standard screw. The bottom plate of the housing is held by four screws, and removing the plate gives you access to all the machine’s components.

Another fit-PC3 highlight is its low power consumption. According to official documentation, the fit-PC model based on the T40E APU consumes just 7W when idling and up to 15W under full system load with dual head display. These numbers refer to fit-PC3 running Windows 7, and we would imagine that they will be even lower with Linux.

For such a small device, fit-PC3 sports a mind-boggling array of ports. On the back of the machine, there are two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, two eSATA ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a dual-head display HDMI connector, a DisplayPort, and a digital 7.1 S/PDIF connector. The port galore doesn’t stop here: a swappable FACE front module boasts four extra USB ports. FACE stands for Function And Connectivity Extension module, and it’s a unique feature of fit-PC3. Currently, only a few FACE modules are available, but CompuLab (the company behind fit-PC3) provides complete documentation and reference designs for creating third-party FACE modules. fit-PC3 is optimized for running Linux, and certain fit-PC3 configurations come with Linux Mint preinstalled.

Since our model didn’t have a hard disk, we added a 64GB SSD and installed Lubuntu 11.10. The installation went without a hitch: all hardware was recognized automatically, and the system duly prompted us to install a proprietary graphics card driver. All in all, fit-PC3 is an impressive little machine, indeed. Its small form factor, modularity, fanless design, and low power consumption make it a perfect machine for a variety of uses.

The only niggle is the price: the most basic Value Barebones model costs 328 US dollars. Add to this shipping, VAT, and the cost of additional components, and you are looking at a rather hefty price tag. That said, its innovative design and remarkably high-end features don’t come cheap, but you do need to decide for yourself whether they justify the price in your specific circumstances.

Verdict: 4/5
fit-PC3 has a lot going for it: diminutive size, solid housing, fanless design, and a slew of ports. Built around the AMD G-series processor and the Radeon HD 6xxx-series graphics card combo, the little machine is a decent performer, too. But fit-PC3 is not cheap – the price you pay for having cutting edge PC tech in such a tiny package.

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Canonical are no stranger to courting controversy where the common desktop paradigm is concerned, and their latest feature for Ubuntu 12.04, HUD (Head-Up Display), is likely to continue poking the hornet’s nest. As you’ll see in the following video the disappearing trick of the menus in your favourite desktop applications is set to go one step further – HUD is designed to replace them entirely.

According to Canonical ‘the HUD has been designed as an easier, faster way to access menus in applications.’ They go on to explain that instead of clicking through menus users can simply type the command they require into a search box.

According to Mark Shuttleworth: “The HUD concept has been the driver for all the work we’ve done in unifying menu systems across Gtk, Qt and other toolkit apps in the past two years. So far, that’s shown up as the global menu. In 12.04, it also gives us the first cut of the HUD.”

Mark’s blog entry goes to explain that the HUD is smart enough to do things like fuzzy matching, and learn what you usually do so it can prioritise them.

“It covers the focused app (because that’s where you probably want to act) as well as system functionality; you can change IM state, or go offline in Skype, all through the HUD, without changing focus, because those apps all talk to the indicator system. When you’ve been using it for a little while it seems like it’s reading your mind, in a good way.”

It’s an interesting feature, and one that we can see translating excellently to mobile and TV, but we would be lying if we weren’t somewhat concerned that this method of navigating menus might stir up the hornets nest for the average computer user. Do users really know and recall the menu options of even their most frequently used applications? And while there are plenty of common sense menu searches taking place in the above video, we’re sure there’s an equal number of other features which aren’t in the slightest bit convenient to navigate by predictive search.

That said, we’re more than happy to be proved wrong, and look forward to testing the feature for ourselves. Speaking of which, testing is underway now, and HUD will be integrated into the 12.04 LTS release due out in April.

In the mean-time, why not let us know your initial thoughts on Canonical’s radical new direction with application menus…

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Analyzing and reverse engineering malware is a difficult task, which should be meticulously done in an isolated environment with specialized tools. In the last few years an interesting Linux distribution has surfaced with the aim to bring malware analysis to the masses. REMnux is the brainchild of security consultant Lenny Zeltser, who recently announced version 3 of his specialized Linux distribution, full of open source tools for analyzing and reverse engineering Flash malware, obfuscated JavaScript, shell code, malicious PDF files, and so on.

Zeltser makes the REMnux 3 release available as a VMware virtual appliance and as an ISO image of a Live CD. The idea is to run the distribution in a virtual machine and then analyze the malware in its isolated environment. REMnux 3 is a trimmed-down version of Ubuntu 11.10 with a hand-picked treasure chest of useful malware analysis tools and is using LXDE as its lightweight desktop environment.

While you could certainly use any general-purpose Linux distribution and install all the tools you need, REMnux offers a convenient pre-chosen collection of malware analysis tools. Most of these tools are meant for examining malware files. For instance, for Flash there’s the SWF disassembler and assembler Flasm, the SWF decompiler Flare and various handy utilities in SWFTools, all of them meant to be able to understand how a particular piece of Flash malware works.

There are also a lot of tools for JavaScript analysis. REMnux has Firefox with some useful extensions like the web development tool Firebug, a User Agent Switcher to fool malicious web sites, and JavaScript Deobfuscator that can handle scripts that are obfuscated and generated on-the-fly. There are also some stand-alone programs to help with JavaScript deobfuscation, such as the Rhino debugger, the Chrome JavaScript engine d8, Windows Script Decoder, jsunpack-extractjs and js-beautify.

Another domain in which REMnux shines is PDF analysis, with powerful tools like the Origami Framework, PDF X-Ray Lite, peepdf and pdftk, as well as pdfid.py that scans a PDF document for different types of keywords, allowing you to identify documents that contain (possibly malicious) JavaScript code or actions.

And if you want to delve deeper, REMnux also includes some tools to analyze shellcode and examine suspicious executable files, as well as the Volatility Framework for memory forensics. But REMnux is not limited to analyzing malware files: the network protocol analyzer Wireshark is also available, as well as fakedns to redirect “phone home” traffic from malware and a couple of tools that simulate network hosts with arbitrary services, which comes in handy when analyzing the behavior of malware in networks.

An annoying shortcoming is that only the graphical tools are listed in the LXDE application menu, which means that most of the tools are not visible in the menu to explore. So if you want to know whether REMnux includes a specific command line malware analysis tool, you just have to try it or look it up in the cheat sheet. A distribution like BackTrack has a better solution for this, as it includes menu items for command line utilities that open a terminal window with the tool showing its usage info (e.g. with the –help option) when you click on it.

Fortunately, REMnux includes a shortcut to the aforementioned cheat sheet on the desktop background to get you started, which lists some general commands and gives an overview of the available tools. The distribution has also set up some convenient aliases for commands in ~/.bash_aliases. The other shortcut on the desktop background opens FreeMind with a template for a mind map for your malware analysis report, which is to remind you to go through the process in a methodical way. Thanks to this guidance of REMnux, analyzing malware has never been so easy.

Verdict: 4/5
While you could certainly use any general-purpose Linux distribution and install all the tools you need, REMnux offers a treasure chest of useful tools to analyze PDF, Flash, JavaScript or other malware. The distribution is not as user-friendly as it could be, but the cheat sheet and the mind map will get you on track in no time.

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Pros: A fast GUI provides quick access to a range of tools, with a PPA option for existing Ubuntu users
Cons: Some tools need a bit of tweaking, while there’s little to differentiate the package from other live CDs
BackBox Homepage

It’s fair to say that there’s no shortage of penetration testing and forensic analysis toolkits – often characterised as ‘hacking toolkits’ – available today. Since the launch of classics including the Auditor Security Collection, a Knoppix-based distribution that would eventually morph into the popular BackTrack, almost every mainstream distribution has gained its own spin-off forensic kit; but what makes BackBox different?

A relative newcomer to the scene, the first release of BackBox was back in September as a project of the Italian Open Soluzioni web community founded by Raffaele Forte. Now on its second major release, BackBox has grown rapidly and offers plenty of scope for both amateur and professional use.

Based on Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution, itself derived from Debian, the latest build of BackBox isn’t exactly bleeding-edge – it’s still using the 2.6 kernel tree in both the x86 and AMD64 flavours – but it does contain an impressive collection of tools. It’s also surprisingly slick; from its lightweight yet attractive Xfce desktop environment to its multi-language live CD boot menu – which includes a ‘forensic’ mode that works to prevent accidental writes to a host system’s drive that could jeopardise evidence gathering activities – BackBox exudes professionalism in an area that all too often goes for glitz and glamour in an effort to attract the ‘script kiddies.’

That’s not to say BackBox is without fault: some of the tools, such as the collaborative documentation web app Dradis, require a daemon to be started before they will operate; if you’re not familiar with the apps you’d be forgiven for overlooking the entries in the ‘Services’ menu, which will leave you staring at error messages wondering where you went wrong.

Despite this, the general experience of using BackBox is pleasurable; there’s a wealth of utilities on hand covering a range of activities – split into Information Gathering, Vulnerability Assessment, Exploitation, Privilege Escalation, Maintaining Access, Documentation & Reporting, Reverse Engineering, Social Engineering, Forensic Analysis, VoIP Analysis, Wireless Analysis and Miscellaneous categories – but it never feels as though anything has been crammed in without aforethought.

It’s also good to see some general-purpose software making the grade; while many forensic live CDs offer only the tools needed for the job, BackBox includes IRC chat software, the AbiWord word processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet, several web browsers, a media player, and even a tool for addressing a scanner connected to the host system.

As with rival forensic and penetration testing toolkits – and we’re specifically thinking of BackTrack here, from which BackBox gets its name – the CD contains tools for analysing both wired and wireless networks, and utilities for recovering or modifying passwords from both POSIX-compliant systems and Microsoft Windows for those who work in a heterogeneous environment.

Impressively, the BackBox team has thought to create a Personal Package Archive – PPA – containing the tools and utilities distributed with the BackBox live CD; as a result, it’s possible to add the exact same tools to an existing Ubuntu-based system without having to replace your day-to-day OS with BackBox. It’s a good idea, and one we’d like to see other specialist distributions copy where possible.

While some of the tools are sadly restricted – such as the open source intelligence gathering package Maltego, which is provided as the free Community Edition with limits on the number of results it will offer – these are few and far between.

It’s true that BackBox is a new project, and currently suffers from a somewhat erratic release schedule, but the distribution is quickly shaping up to be a serious alternative to established forensic distributions like BackTrack.

Verdict: 4/5
BackBox isn’t perfect: beginners may find themselves puzzled over tools that require daemons not automatically started on bootup, but it holds a wealth of power for those willing to learn. The inclusion of general purpose software is also welcome, and the existence of a PPA for adding the live CD’s tools to a desktop Ubuntu install seals the deal.

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Unlike the media that preceded it, the internet is interactive. We can determine what we read, and how we read it. We are the editors and the filters. The internet is hard to police, and harder to censor. Technology is redefining the possibilities for information exchange and the dissemination of ideas.

At the same time there has been a steady movement by governments and corporate bodies to use copyright and patent law as tools to lock down the ownership of ideas. And while the web is convenient and easy as a channel for communication and information, all that lies between us and our right to privacy and our ability to communicate is an ISP, a Facebook account or a Google database. The web may have facilitated the uprisings of the Arab Spring but governments can still censor what we read, BT was able to block access to the file sharing site Newzbin, and MPs could call for Twitter and RIM to be shut down during the summer riots.

In ‘The Economy of Ideas’, published in 1994, John Perry Barlow wrote: “Copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book… Counterfeiting and distributing counterfeit volumes were obvious and visible activities – it was easy enough to catch somebody in the act of doing. Finally, unlike unbounded words or images, books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher’s marques, and price tags… All the goods of the Information Age – all of the expressions once contained in books or film strips or newsletters – will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to own in the old sense of the word.”

Free software and the web have challenged conventional concepts of ownership – and, not surprisingly, the content and software industries have tended towards an opposite understanding of ownership, which extends from the appropriation of things as disparate as human genes and species of plants to the ownership of artistic concepts and ideas.

The means for extending ownership over everything and anything has been a judicial bending of patent and copyright law. A not untypical example was the patenting in 1986 of the Amazonian hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca, which led to a South American tribal council, representing more than 400 tribes and indigenous groups, visiting the US ten years later to protest against the decision. Antonio Jacanamijoy, a spokesmen for the Indians, observed that “our ancestors learned the knowledge of this medicine and we are the owners of this knowledge…” and this is not an isolated case. Many more such patents have passed unnoticed and have gone unchallenged because the cost is prohibitive and the protesters have no sentimental appeal.

Concurrent with the steady extension of patent and copyright law to include everything has been the adoption of laws, in both the US and in Europe, that infringe the rights of technologists to freely develop and interoperate with proprietary technologies. We only have to see how Apple and Microsoft have used patent law to impede the makers of Android devices.

And the developing world is being prised into the same mindset where everything on Earth is something that can be owned and sold, in what Herbert Schiller called “the corporate takeover of public expression”, where the software firms own the programmer’s right to code, drug companies own the right to traditional medicines, and entertainment industries own the musician’s right to play. But it isn’t really working. In the face of the onslaught of the web, the traditional media are taking a battering.

Ideas belong to no one. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possess the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

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Pros: Good community behind it. Lots of desktops and applications.
A good way of demonstrating desktop Linux.
Cons: Beyond using it as a demonstration appliance, you’d have to be a
Gentoo expert. A bit unwieldy for every day use.
Gentoo Homepage

First released in 2002 and based around source code rather than pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo has become famous for the flexibility it offers. However, the Gentoo live DVD is a different beast altogether, leveraging existing Gentoo technology to provide a ready-made desktop that boots from removable media such as a DVD or a USB flash drive. It’s a comprehensive system with a wide variety of applications along with a selection of the current desktops. The disc includes current versions of Gnome 3, Xfce, E16, Fluxbox, LXDE and XBMC and KDE4, and there is a distinct bias towards KDE applications and desktop applications in general.

If you’ve used a recent build of KDE4, you’ll already have an idea of what to expect from the KDE4 desktop. As with most of the desktops environments on the disc, the backdrop contains icons for: the bug tracking system, installing Adobe Flash, a link to the Gentoo IRC channel, a link to the support forums and the user handbook. Those icons give a clue to one of the advantages of the lineage of this distro: it’s the product of an established community.

With several desktops and such a huge set of installed applications, this thing’s a monster. Exploring the application launcher confirms what we expected, this application load-out is extremely broad. On the one hand, this means that this might be a viable complete desktop system in situations in which adding additional applications via the package manager is inconvenient. On the other hand, there is a lot to wade through, including a lot of smaller, slightly obscure KDE applications (KBruch, the fractions tutor anyone?). Amongst the more mainstream applications, there’s quite a lot of redundancy and overlap. For example, there are at least five fully fledged web browsers, and this holds true for every category of application.

There is no GUI hard disk installer included with this live DVD, and this fact won’t surprise long-term Gentoo users as even the regular distribution relies on manual installation from the command line. It is, however, possible to carry out an installation from any working Linux installation, including the Gentoo live DVD. The fact remains that the lack of a GUI installer is at odds with what people have come to expect from a live distro.

The way in which it handles persistent storage of user data is an important feature of a live distro. Again as there is no GUI for doing this in Gentoo, you’ll have to set up the partitions and create the needed file by hand. Although, the location for the file is quite flexible. Once persistence is up and running, it should be possible customise the distro using Gentoo’s Portage package management system that fetches source code packages ready for compilation. Frankly, it’s for time-served Gentoo enthusiasts only and probably not the intended focus of the live DVD.

A live system from the developers of one of the most techy DIY distributions was always going to be a strange animal. It might sound a bit mean-spirited to point it out, but although Gentoo is a well established distro, it’s not as well known as some of the others. Consequently, if you want to install it or begin to modify it, you have to be familiar with the the Gentoo way of doing things. It’s important to remember that in the case of a desktop distro, you might, for example, be forced to give a non-expert instructions over the phone, and that just isn’t going to work in the case of Gentoo.

Verdict: 3/5
In theory, this live DVD image could be used to provide a Linux desktop on portable media, but its bulk and relative inflexibility mean that it wouldn’t be our first choice in that role. It is however a first class portable demonstrator of what desktop Linux can offer. Existing Gentoo experts will probably be pleased with it.

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ARM sub-architectural cleanup will see further de-duplication of code between the many different supported sub-architectures (variants) of ARM, and a continuation of the ongoing work to produce a unified 32-bit ARM kernel binary capable of supporting many different systems. Historically, having a single kernel image for ARM has not been a priority since these systems have typically been heavily vertically integrated embedded systems. But in the emerging space of general-purpose ARM-based computers and servers, it will be increasingly important that Linux vendors can provide a single OS image able to support a wide variety of possible installation target systems. It is likely that the initial effort will produce options for compiling a kernel containing support for many variants of the same sub-architecture, but this will become increasingly generic as code is refactored underneath.

Microsoft Hyper-V support is another area where there is likely to be some action in the shorter term. At this point, KY Srinivasen and the Microsoft team have been developing support for their hypervisor technology within the Linux ‘staging’ tree (drivers/staging within the source code) for some time. Greg Kroah-Hartman and others who are involved in maintaining the staging tree do so as a means to provide a place for nurturing new driver code not considered ready for prime time. Drivers generally land in staging, are improved over a period of a kernel release or two, and are then moved out of staging and into the mainline kernel. Except in the case of Hyper-V, which has been in staging since mid-2009. At this point, however, it seems that the code is finally ready for a general review by the many different subsystem maintainers whose parts of the kernel are to be affected by Hyper-V support being included. It has not been an easy ride for Microsoft, but it may be over very soon.

Development will continue to take place largely as it has done, in roughly three-month release cycles, punctuated with increasingly short ‘merge windows’ (during which disruptive changes are allowed) and subsequent periods of stabilisation. The linux-next tree built by Stephen Rothwell on a daily basis from the collected trees of many different developers will continue to be the central nexus for new feature development and testing prior to gaining approval for inclusion into an official Linux release, while the staging tree will continue to be the place for new driver development (it is hoped that linux-next will include the staging tree in due course to allow for testing of interactions between the two).

Overall this means that the established development workflows will continue to be the status quo in 2012 with little to no variation.

Further out, and perhaps lasting beyond the next year, there are likely to be some significant changes to the kernel if Linus follows through on his recent leanings towards merging Android patches. In recent mailings, Linus has acknowledged that the millions of users of Android devices should not be ignored by the kernel community. Many Android patches remain outside of the official kernel (instead, they are contained within the official Android kernel, which is maintained by Google). There have been attempts to merge specific sets of Android patches into the official kernel, with some success, but there is a long road ahead to reconcile all of the differences. We will continue to cover these changes each month in
this column.

Finally, some things may never change. The year 2012 will begin with the RT (Real Time) kernel patches still being maintained outside of the official Linux kernel and it will likely end in the same fashion, albeit with the set of patches progressively shrinking over time. There are many people now using the Real Time patches in production environments, both at the large (stock markets) and small (mobile phones) ends. The patches are well proven and reliable, but there is still a level of disruption there in terms of performance overhead imposed on those who do not want Real Time features.

Once there is an ability for compile (or runtime) zero-overhead disabling of the Real Time support, then the patches are likely to be merged.

Ongoing development
Linus Torvalds announced the latest 3.2 release candidate kernel “just in time for [the US] Thanksgiving” holiday, in one of his typically humorous emails beginning “Hey, since most of the US will be in a food-induced coma tomorrow, I just know that doing a new release candidate is a good idea”. The final 3.2 release may be out by the time you read this. It includes a number of new features (which will be covered in a future issue), the removal of many lines of old code that is no longer required, and fixes for some important bugs (such as a severe RAID regression that was present in 3.1 and should be resolved by an updated 3.1.z release by your preferred distribution).

This month saw the publishing of a ‘Plumbers Wish List’ for Linux. The core guts of any Linux system are often referred to as its ‘plumbing’ and those who work on such pieces of infrastructure are known as ‘plumbers’ (hence the name of the Linux Plumbers Conference). The Wish List, which was published by several prominent developers, includes both mundane and more exciting future features, all of which should combine to offer an improved user experience. On the list were finally providing a means to modify a FAT file system label without unmounting it first, changing the name of a process (argv) without playing with environ settings, and detecting if a process is running within a container (a separated namespace). The full list is available in the Linux Kernel Mailing List archives, which you can find here.

A collective decision has been made that a new TAINT_OOT_MODULE flag be introduced for out-of-tree (non-upstream) kernel modules. This will mark all loaded kernel modules that are not shipped with the kernel in such a way that any diagnostic kernel output (from an oops, say) will include the special TAINTED status. At the same time, a change to the kernel will no longer disable certain functionality – in this case tracing – when a TAINT flag is set. As the original author of the TAINT flag support notes, they are supposed to convey information, not determine kernel behaviour. If a system administrator wants to load a binary kernel module that is not compatible with their kernel, they have bigger issues to worry about.

Finally, Ted T’so and Ingo Molnar had an interesting debate in several threads focused on whether utilities and tools designed to work with the Linux kernel should be developed within the kernel source tree. Ingo’s work on the perf (performance monitoring) tools takes place in a tools subdirectory of the official Linux kernel source, something that he claims improves overall code quality because the development is so tied to that of the kernel. Meanwhile, Ted and others note that this close relationship between a tool and the kernel source could actually serve to be detrimental to maintaining a strictly compatible ABI (application binary interface) between the kernel and such tools across multiple releases. Others point out that there are limits to what can be carried in the kernel source tree. Perf utilities are one thing; a simple tool to manage Linux KVM virtual machines now being proposed may be quite another.

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Pros: A clever idea. Easy to use for end-users as it looks and works like a traditional desktop
Cons: Installation is tricky. Documentation is disorganised. Still feature-poor compared to 1.8
eyeOS Homepage

Although eyeOS is technically a web application, conceptually it blurs the line between an application and an operating system. Unlike Google’s office offerings such as Google Docs, eyeOS offers a full desktop, complete with movable windows, alongside a suite of applications. What’s more, the system is extensible, and developers are free to create their own applications for the system and to modify the open source version of the project. At the time of writing, version 2.5 is the latest official release and 1.9 is the community-maintained release of the old 1.x branch.

From the outset, the project documentation presented a disappointment. To carry out an installation, one would almost certainly have to make use of the guide on the website in conjunction with the forum and the downloadable PDF manual. A full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) system must be assembled before beginning the actual eyeOS installation, and things can get a bit tricky as eyeOS is quite finicky about the Apache and PHP settings. We give extra points for the install script that does its best to ensure that you have a fully compliant system, but we deduct some for the lack of comprehensive feedback from a fully installed yet non-functioning system. ‘There is an error in this eyeOS installation, please contact the system administrator’ is a typical error, accompanied by no useful output to any logs.

A morning spent moving between the forum and the supplied documentation should be sufficient for an experienced web administrator, but those less familiar with the intricacies of the LAMP will probably struggle. Being fair, it is a more complex system than, say, a typical CMS such as WordPress.

The eyeOS desktop itself makes use of familiar desktop computing paradigms. There are two main panels and a desktop backdrop with some icons. In the negative column, just like a webpage, text alignment within the GUI can be a bit haphazard, which can make the interface confusing at times. Its use of the Oxygen icon set along with a liberal application of white space gives eyeOS a look that is reminiscent of KDE 4. Performance is acceptable, but it’s not as snappy as a conventional desktop, and it even seemed a bit slow compared to version 1.9.

As with traditional desktop computing, user data is stored in files and folders – and to this end, there is a traditional file manager. Collaboration and file-sharing features are well integrated but insular. For example, the included instant messaging application only works with other eyeOS users. Getting files out of the system involves using the sharing system which spits out a URL that can be accessed from anywhere; moving files into the system involves uploading via the browser. It’s quite neat actually.

The included document editor is pretty impressive, as it does resemble a fully featured word processor. However, the ‘fit and finish’ isn’t quite as tight as we’d like it to be. Text had a tendency to jump about as it was entered, and occasionally, highlighted text simply disappeared for no reason, although it could be retrieved by using the undo function.

This project, in its current open source version, constitutes a cautionary tale in open source forking. Now at version 2.5, the current official branch does, in many respects, represent a step backwards from the final maintenance releases of the 1.9 series. The lack of available applications is glaring, omitting as such basics as a spreadsheet program. Unfortunately, version 2.5 is incompatible with the myriad third-party applications that were available for previous versions.

Verdict: 3/5
Oh how the mighty have fallen. Unfortunately, at version 2.5, eyeOS still doesn’t seem to have caught up with everything that the old 1.x branch had to offer. The still maintained 1.9 version continues to be a very good system in its own right and would be our recommendation.

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