OStatic blogs

Report: Android-related Projects Far Outpace iOS Projects

Sam Dean — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:56:27 GMT

The creation of new Android-related open source projects picked up in a big way in 2012, radically outpacing new iOS projects, according to data released by Black Duck Software. Black Duck manages and secures implementations of open source software, and has large samples of real-world data on open source software in use and in development. Its latest study shows that new Android mobile projects outstripped iOS projects by a factor of four in 2012, expanding by at least 96 percent in each year since 2007. New iOS project growth, by comparison, was 32 percent from 2011 to 2012.

The analysis of open source mobile project data pulled from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, a repository of data containing about one million open source projects, and Ohloh.net, the public directory of free and open source software, looked at the growth of mobile open source projects over a five-year period beginning in 2007.

According to Black Duck's findings:

"Over 15, 000 new Android mobile projects were launched in 2012, bringing the total number of Android projects in the KnowledgeBase to more than 28,000. New projects associated with the iOS platform numbered nearly 2,500 in 2012, with a cumulative total of more than 7,000 projects. All other mobile platforms accounted for fewer than 500 new projects in 2012, for a total of fewer than 2,000 projects over the 2007 - 2012 period."

"As the growth of open source has continued to evolve and shape attitudes towards the commercial value of software, it has begun to fundamentally alter a variety of software markets," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk, in a statement. "Black Duck's data on mobile OSS growth is yet more evidence of this."

As we've noted, among handset makers, Samsung continues to be the big winner as developers and users continue to flock to Android. We've also reported on the fact that developers have more economic incentives to develop for the iPhone.

Still, Android development is clearly running at a very healthy clip and the ecosystem of applications for Android is at critical mass. That news is even good for iOS users, because the more competition there is among app developers, the better things turn out for all mobile users.

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Meet Pidora: A Custom Version of Fedora for Raspberry Pi

Sam Dean — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:43:42 GMT

As the diminutive $25/$35 Linux-based Raspberry Pi devices continue to contribute to imaginative applications, they're also emerging as shining examples of new ways Linux can be deployed. Tinkerers have already put all flavors of Linux on the devices, and now, Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) have announced the release of Pidora 18, a custom version of Fedora specifically for the Raspberry Pi. Here is more on it.

Pidora has its own web site set up, complete with download links, installation instructions, release notes and an announcement, which specifies the following:

"We're excited to announce the release of Pidora 18 -- an optimized Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi. It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set.

There are some interesting new features we'd like to highlight:

* Almost all of the Fedora 18 package set available via yum (thousands of packages were built from the official Fedora repository and made available online)

* Compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi

* Graphical firstboot configuration (with additional modules specifically made for the Raspberry Pi)

* Compact initial image size (for fast downloads) and auto-resize (for maximum storage afterwards)

* Auto swap creation available to allow for larger memory usage

* C, Python, & Perl programming languages available & included in the SD card image * Initial release of headless mode can be used with setups lacking a monitor or display

* IP address information can be read over the speakers and flashed with the LED light

* For graphical operation, Gedit text editor can be used with plugins (python console, file manager, syntax highlighting) to serve as a mini-graphical IDE

* For console operation, easy-to-use text editors are included (nled, nano, vi) plus Midnight Commander for file management

* Includes libraries capable of supporting external hardware such as motors and robotics (via GPIO, I2C, SPI)

Pidora replaces Fedora Raspberry Pi Remix, a previous version of Fedora for the Pi.

It's likely that we're going to see many more custom operating systems tweaked for the Pi, especially as more users find unusual applications for the low cost but powerful devices. As noted here this week, Raspberry Pis are even being chained together into supercomputers and powerful clusters, giving them credibility at the high-end of the computing landscape, where Linux has long had a strong foothold.

For more on Raspberry Pis in high-end applications, see this post.

 (Photo Credit: University of Southampton)

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A Look Inside Tumblr's Architecture

Jon Buys — Thu, 23 May 2013 03:56:45 GMT

Yahoo recently purchased Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion. Tumblr pushes some surprisingly high numbers through their service, so aninside look at the architecture that Yahoo bought is well worth the read. The portion I found most interesting are the details on the MySQL database setup, and how Tumblr uses MySQL to scale massively, and keep the service available.

High Scaleability interviewed Blake Matheny, Distributed Systems Engineer at Tumblr, who summed up their views on MySQL best:

MySQL (plus sharding) scales, apps don’t.

Nowhere in the discussion is mention of master-master replication, DRBD, or database clustering. Data in the database is replicated using standard master-slave MySQL replication, and, as quoted above, split between servers using sharding. Sharding, to grossly oversimplify, is the splitting of data between physical machines. In one example, Database A might hold all the user accounts for last names starting with letters A-M, and Database B might hold all the user accounts for last names starting with letters N-Z. The application would then need to look up in an index which database server would hold the account they were looking for. To scale this setup out horizontally from two servers to four, the database would be split four ways instead of two: A-G, H-M, N-T, U-Z, or something similar.

Sharding provides a form of high availability in that even if one database server goes down, the entire application stays up, and only the users who’s accounts reside on the broken server would be affected. If you couple sharding with MySQL replication slaves for doing reads off of, it is even more likely that the application will “appear” to be up when a single database server is down. Appropriate error handling in the application could convey a message to the user indicating that something is wrong, and that the hosting company is working on it.

Tumblr’s setup has survived more traffic than most sites will ever have to endure, and at a very high standard. When discussing Tumblr’s decision to move to a Java Virtual Machine and the Scala language, Blake said:

…they target 5ms response times, 4 9s HA, 40K requests per second and some at 400K requests per second.

The stats section towards the top of the article says the rest:

500 million page views a day

15B+ page views month

~20 engineers

Peak rate of ~40k requests per second

1+ TB/day into Hadoop cluster

Many TB/day into MySQL/HBase/Redis/Memcache

Growing at 30% a month

~1000 hardware nodes in production

Billions of page visits per month per engineer

Posts are about 50GB a day. Follower list updates are about 2.7TB a day.

Dashboard runs at a million writes a second, 50K reads a second, and it is growing.

For many of us in smaller data centers, these numbers are pretty far out of our reach. Dumping “Many TB/day” into anything could cause a major problem with disk space. What fascinates me about Tumblr’s architecture is that 1) it is built entirely off of open source code, and 2) if Tumblr can scale their infrastructure with 4 9’s requirements and 500 million page views per day with MySQL, I think most of us can too.

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KDE 4.11 to be Long Term Release

Susan Linton — Thu, 23 May 2013 03:23:05 GMT

It was just last week we looked at some of the proposed features for upcoming KDE 4.11 as it neared soft feature freeze. Well, today some new information about KDE 4.11 came to light. Aaron Seigo said today that 4.11 would be a "long term release."

A long term release means a particular version will be kept up to date with stabilization and security updates for an extended period of time; in this case, two years. This will give distributions that skate safely in the well-worn groove of stability a chance to have a longer term plan and more stable offerings. Seigo said, "no new features [will be] added after 4.11.0 to Plasma Desktop and Netbook, though the code will be adjusted as needed to maintain and improve existing functionality." He believes this will help developers and distribution developers a chance to focus on polishing.

For those that like upgrading each release Seigo said:

This does not effect, in any way, anything other than the code currently in the kde-workspace repository. Applications are not affected, kdelibs and kderuntime will continue on as they currently are (with kdelibs in a feature freeze of its own already). I fully expect there to be a 4.12 and likely a 4.13 release of the applications, and how long that goes on will be up to the application developers and release team.

Seigo continues as if this news will get ruffle some feathers. I suppose they've come to expect that any announcement will. He said focusing on stabilization and security for so long helped KDE 3.5 become so successful, but hopes any updates to 4.1x won't be overlooked when KDE built on QT5 and Plasma Workspaces 2 appear. So, hold on to your socks boys and girls, announcing a LTR is actually announcing KDE 5. It'll be here within two years if all goes as planned and distributions will begin including it. <cue ominous music>

Additionally, Seigo took the opportunity to speak of "decoupling the Software Compilation" from the KDE base. He feels a longer release cycle than is the norm now would help developers make better apps. He said it's just getting too hard to get every little sub-project all ready to release at the same exact time. So, perhaps more independent development of the application stack would promote stability and less stressed developers (and release managers).

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Version 2.5 of Moodle Online Learning Platform Arrives

Sam Dean — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:01:53 GMT

In the growing world of online learning, Moodle has carved out a niche for itself. Moodle is a free, open source course management and webinar-production platform that we've written about many times on the OStatic blog. It provides a reat way to reach large online audiences for interactive events on topics ranging from marketing to tutorials, and there is a mobile app for it. Now, the Moodle community has announced version 2.5, adding hundreds of improvements that may be of special interest to teachers, students and administrators.

Moodle 2.5 is available now for free download from the community site at http://moodle.org. Upgrades are supported from any previous version of Moodle, and if you don't have any experience with this e-learning platform, a certified Moodle Partner (http://moodle.com/partners) can help with upgrades, installation or customiing online coursework.

Among many universities that use Moodle to deliver online courses, U.C. Berkeley offers Moodle-based, free online courses and lectures. You can use Moodle to produce podcasts, include videos in online events, or deliver online presentations.

According to the announcement, new features include:

Use it on mobile: Moodle themes can now utilise the popular Bootstrap framework from Twitter. This means the appearance of Moodle can be attractive, flexible and responsive, allowing the site to perform equally well on desktops and mobile touch screens without additional work. In addition Moodle 2.5 supports the latest Moodle Mobile app for iOS and Android, which provides additional features for offline access to Moodle content and easy uploading of photos and videos from mobile devices.

Improved usability: Moodle 2.5 has a host of smaller improvements for usability. Forms now look a lot simpler, with advanced settings being collapsed by default. Drag and drop images and text straight into a course page from the desktop or another browser window. Display course folders directly on the course page. Jump quickly between course sections, and more. This continues Moodle’s focus on usability improvements in every release.

In this post, we also covered free online resources for getting started with Moodle. HowtoMoodle.com, in particular, is an excellent resource for people who would like to delve into this platform or perhaps build a quick online course.

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It's Easier Than Ever to Slap Your Favorite Linux Distro Onto a Chromebook

Sam Dean — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:48:06 GMT

If you've been in the market for a portable computer, you may very well have considered buying a Chromebook. And, if you favor a particular Linux distro, perhaps Ubuntu or Mint, you may be interested in buying a $200 or $250 Chromebook only to put your favorite flavor of Linux on your new system. (The Acer system shown here sells for $199.) As we've reported, many OStatic readers have expressed interest in buying a Chromebook to run Linux. Now, there are very simple instructions for doing so online and a growing body of evidence that people are having good experiences with their Linux Chromebooks.

The trend toward slapping Linux on Chromebooks will only pick up now that the latest version of the Linux kernel includes code for running Linux on the devices. You can read more about modifications to the Linux kernel for Chromebooks in Wired's story here. But right here on OStatic, we've seen lots of evidence that readers are interested in buying inexpensive Chromebooks only to run Ubuntu, Mint or other Linux flavors on the systems.

Here is one reader comment from this recent post:

"The only redeeming value of Chromebooks is the ability to install Linux on them, in place of ChromeOS."

There are videos on YouTube and other sites that show how easy it is to put a favorite Linux distro on a Chromebook, but one of the most straightforward tutorials appears on Lifehacker. In this post, you'll find a step-by-step guide to how to install Ubuntu and get a lot of extras out of a Chromebook.

According to Lifehacker:

"[We] use a tool called Crouton to install Ubuntu (hat tip to our friends at the How-To Geek), which uses the chroot command to run Ubuntu on top of Chrome OS, which is already based on Linux. Unlike dual-booting, that means you can switch between Chrome OS and Ubuntu with a quick keyboard shortcut, no reboots necessary, which is awesome."

One other OStatic reader wrote the following in response to a recent post:

"In terms of size and weight, this is my dream computer; I tested it at Best Buy and fell head over heels in love. But agree with the comments above on Chrome OS. The question is, does it excel at running "standard" linux distros like Mint or Fedora? Can you post the link? If this runs Mint well, I would buy it today."

The fact is, the low cost Chromebooks come with pretty solid hardware resources, and it's easy to run both Chrome OS and your favorite Linux version on a Chromebook. Look for this trend to continue as Google woos more hardware partners into producing Chromebooks at competitive prices.

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OpenMandriva Picks Name, Releases Alpha

Susan Linton — Wed, 22 May 2013 03:50:50 GMT

While the rest of Linuxdom was reading of the Debian 7.0 and Mageia 3 releases, the OpenMandriva gang have been hard at it trying to get their new distribution some attention. The OpenMandriva name was made official and an alpha was released into the wild.

On May 6, João Patrício announced that the decision that an official name for the community Mandriva/ROSA distribution. As predicted, and is now obvious, OpenMandriva beat out other contenders such as Moondrake, OpenMDV (which would probably be pronounced the same), Lomax, and ROMA.

And if that wasn't enough excitement for a Tuesday night, Bernhard Rosenkränzer recently announced a tech/developer preview or alpha. Not much information accompanied the announcement except that a grub issue was addressed and the new branding is replacing ROSA's. Rosenkränzer said, "This should be good enough to get up and running..." It's a live image and it looks very much like we remember. We'll check back again soon.

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Dell Changes Up OpenStack Cloud Plans

Sam Dean — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:03:10 GMT

In a major announcement from Dell yesterday, the company announced that its public cloud ecosystem and strategy will be centered on partners Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag, and will emphasize recent acquisition Enstratius. The announcement represents one of the biggest snubs to the open source OpenStack platorm yet, as Dell had previously announced that its whole public cloud strategy would be built around OpenStack.

According to Dell's announcement:

"Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. Acting as a single-source supplier, Dell will offer customers a choice of vendors and technology, freedom from lock-in to a single platform or pricing model and a central point of solution integration and control. Sales of Dell’s current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings."

Wow, that's a far cry from the OpenStack-centric, flexible and open plans that Dell had been discussing.

“Many Dell customers plan to expand their use of public cloud, but in order to truly reap the benefits, they want a choice of providers, flexibility and interoperability across platforms and models, the ability to compare cloud economics and workload performance, and a cohesive way to manage all of it,” said Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president, Dell Cloud, in a statement.

All of this is exactly what I was referring to in my recent post "In Five Years, Expect Far Fewer OpenStack Service Providers."

OpenStack has more hype than it does deployments. The OpenStack Foundation is crowded with heavy-hitting sponsors and partners, and in recent months we've seen OpenStack services and announcements from Rackspace, HP, Internap and AT&T. Red Hat and IBM are also diving into the fray, and Dell was a notable participant until now. It seems inevitable that there will be further market shakeouts, and some organizations deploying OpenStack could end up very unhappy with the support and services that they are getting.

Support, in particular, is part of why a company like Dell would want to align with partners in the cloud rather than forge its own path. It's hard to support cloud deployments, and some providers of OpenStack services and support are going to confront that issue the hard way.

Dell does have big plans for Enstratius, though, including working with some OpenStack deployments by pass through with Enstratius. The company noted the following:

"Dell’s newly acquired multi-cloud management platform, Enstratius, will help customers manage both single and multi-cloud environments, and can help integrate the partner offerings into Dell’s end-to-end cloud solutions. Enstratius currently supports more than 20 public and private cloud platforms, including OpenStack, VMware, Rackspace and Windows Azure, with the added flexibility to easily add new clouds."

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Raspberry Pis Chained Together Provide Massive Computing Muscle

Sam Dean — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:47:53 GMT

As we've covered before, when it comes to the top open source stories of the last 12 months, it's clear that one of the biggest is the proliferation of tiny, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. The Linux-based Raspberry Pi, priced at $25 and $35, leads the pack among these devices.

But in a new twist on what Raspberry Pi devices are capable of, they're being chained together to form supercomputers and powerful clusters. If it sounds like a joke, you may be surprised at the enormous computing power these lash-ups are capable of. They may even have the power to democratize supercomputing-level data crunching at very low price points.

Late last year, as we noted here, news came from the University of Southampton that Professor Simon Cox and his team of researchers had lashed together an actual supercomputer made of 64 credit card-sized Raspberry Pis using Lego pieces as the glue for the cluster. The imaginative result is shown in the photo above.

Professor Cox said: “As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer.”

You can get the guide to making your own Raspberry Pi supercomputer here, and find more information on Cox's version here.

Meanwhile, Boise University PhD candidate Joshua Kiepert has mashed up a 32-node cluster from Raspberry Pi devices. He has a great account of his effort and the architecture he used online (PDF). As The Register notes, Kiepert's total bill of materials came to $1967.21, and:

"As he contemplated the design for such a cluster, Kipert settled on Arch Linux for its tiny size. He eschewed the Pi's micro-USB port as a power source, as he felt it would complicate cabling, instead using a 5V pin on the machines' I/O headers...The Pis were also overclocked, using Turbo Mode, to give Kiepert the grunt needed to run his simulations."

According to Kiepert, "by building my own cluster I could outfit it with anything I might need directly."

These lash-ups of many Raspberry Pis working in tandem may sound like novelties, but if you look at Cox's and Kiepert's accounts of their projects it becomes clear that they are harnessing massive compute power at very low price points.

There is a need for supercomputers and clusters that can perform ongoing, dedicated computing tasks without racking up huge bills for researchers. The Raspberry Pi may end up being part of the equation that solves for that need.

Photo Credit: University of Southampton and Professor Simon Cox

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Maintain A Local Repo

Jon Buys — Tue, 21 May 2013 02:23:04 GMT

NextStep4it has a nice little tutorial on setting up a local CentOS yum mirror using reposync. Maintaining a local mirror has several benefits, and is a recommended practice for maintaining even modest number of servers. Pointing all your updates at a local mirror speeds up patching, reduces bandwidth consumption, and standardizes patch sets across periods of time.

One of the first systems I set up when building a new SuSE environment back in 2006 was to setup a local patch mirror. SLES 8 and SLES 9 allowed mirroring the entire repository locally, as long as you could provide support credentials. I believe that practice changed with SLES 10, but I’m not sure. By the time migration to SLES 10 was being discussed, we were well on our way to switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL was solid for the years that we ran it, but one of the things that always bothered me was how they managed access to the patches.

Since we were used to having our own local repository, one of the first things I wanted to do was replicate the setup. However, RHEL is setup to expect to either grab patches straight from Red Hat’s servers, or to download them locally from a Satellite server, at an annual price of around $25,000, if I remember correctly. The price was high enough that we were not going to easily get it through upper management.

So, we went without for a while, and I missed the local repo each and every time we went to patch our systems. At one point we even maxed out our Internet connection by kicking off a yum update on too many servers at once. In fact, the lack of control over the patching system is one of the reasons we made the switch to CentOS last year. That and the freedom from licensing fees. I understand that there are ways around the restrictions, but when you are operating at an enterprise level, most people involved are reluctant to step outside of the supported box.

Another benefit of maintaining your own local repository is the ability to ensure that all servers in your environment are receiving the same set of patches. Since new patches are released nearly every day, if you are patching production weeks after test, it is almost a guarantee that you are not getting the same set of patches. The best way to do an accurate test of the patches as they flow up from test, to QA, to production is to turn off the sync during patching periods. You won’t get the latest patches, but if you are applying patches on a regular schedule you can ensure that your environment stays relatively up to date and in sync.

For the past year since switching to CentOS we’ve been maintaining a Spacewalk server, which is the open source counterpart of Red Hat’s Satellite. But, since we are moving over to Puppet for configuration management, and still need finer grained control over patching than Spacewalk can give us, I’ll soon be returning to the way we did things with SLES in 2006. As soon as this round of patching is over, we’ll be shutting down Spacewalk and setting up a local mirror, most likely using reposync.

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Chromium May Become Default Ubuntu Browser in Version 13.10

Sam Dean — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:37:30 GMT

Ever since 2005, Ubuntu has delivered Mozilla's Firefox browser as its default browser, which has made millions of Ubuntu users loyal users of Firefox. But Firefox is hardly the only browser choice that Ubuntu users have. If you've tried Chromium--the open source core of Google's Chrome browser--you already know that it's fast, clean and very stable. That has now produced a lively discussion going on online about whether Ubuntu 13.10, due later this year, should ship with Chromium as the default browser.

Much of the discussion surrounding making Chromium the default browser in Ubuntu sprang out of the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit, where many developers supported the switch. As Google made clear at its recent Google I/O conference, the Chrome browser has made huge market share gains in the past year, and Chromium presents an interface familiar to Chrome users. Development for Chromium is also robust and fast-paced.

But there is another reason why Canonical may want to tie Ubuntu development to Chromium development. Google has seen its Chrome strategy working on many kinds of mobile platforms, ranging from Chromebooks to smartphones. Canonical has ambitious plans for bringing Ubuntu to phones, tablets and other platforms. Chromium development may dovetail with these plans for Ubuntu in serendipitous ways, as Canonical seeks to deliver common interfaces and experiences for Ubuntu users on many kinds of devices.

Especially as Canonical moves forward with Ubuntu Touch and the other components of its mobile plans, watch for a switch to Chromium as the default browser. And, users of Firefox on Ubuntu may be surprised to hear that Chromium is absolutely competive with Firefox. I use both browsers on Ubuntu, and see many advantages to Chromium, including performance advantages.

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Samsung Calls Out Developers with $800,000 Galaxy S4 App Challenge

Sam Dean — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:51:32 GMT

If you've been following recent market share numbers for smartphones and mobile operating systems, then you know that Samsung has achieved a dominant position with its Android phones, and especially the Galaxy line of phones. Now, Samsung has launched its "Samsung Smart App Challenge 2013," inviting developers who work with the company's peer-to-peer software to develop competitive apps for the S4 phone. The contest includes $800,000 in prize money.

Samsung's challenge will determine the best Galaxy S4 apps that make use of the Samsung Chord SDK. Chord is a software framework for creating wireless connections between Samsung smartphones without the use of external servers or wireless network resources. Apps entered in the challenge will compete for uniqueness, design and commercial potential, and have to be entered between June 20 and Aug. 31. The judging will continue through November, and all entries should be sold on Samsung Apps.

As PC World has noted:

"Samsung is marketing its peer-to-peer technology to end users as 'Group Play,' a service for multiplayer games or sharing music and photos among users of its phones and tablets. The company is the world's largest smartphone manufacturer but relies on Google's Android ecosystem for the bulk of its online offerings and apps, most of which also run on rival phones."

Samsung's contest will name 10 winners, awarding $200,000 to the top winner, $100,000 each to three second-place winners, and $50,000 each to six third-place developers. Look for more of these lucrative app challenges as the smartphone platform wars continue. You can get many more details about Samsung's contest here.

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Mageia 3 Released with Steamy Goodness

Susan Linton — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:51:54 GMT

The third official release of, the popular Mandriva fork, Mageia is now available. After months of delays and a mountain of challenges, Patricia Fraser said, "We still can't believe how much fun it is to make Mageia together, and we've been doing it for two and a half years."

Like every new release, Mageia 3 comes chocked full 'o upgrades. Some of these include Linux 3.8.13, Xorg X Server 1.13.4, GCC 4.7.2, KDE 4.10.2, GNOME 3.6, LibreOffice 4.0.2, GIMP 2.8.2, and Firefox 17.05. But a few new surprises await as well.

Then I read the three little words that bring joy to any gal's heart: Steam for linux!. It's now available in Mageia repositories. I've been waiting for my chance to join Steam and play some new games and here it is. Suddenly GRUB 2 still being experimental doesn't seem quite so bad. UEFI works, but Secure Boot is not a priority.

Be sure to check next week's Distrowatch Weekly for my full review - which I'm sure at least one paragraph will be on the success of setting up 3D support and playing Half-Life!!! But for those wondering: RPM, Urpmi, and Rpmdrake got lots of attention; installing new kernels is easier; and the /usr move is now complete.

Get yours at www.mageia.org. Check the release notes for upgrading dos and dont's. Check the errata for known issues.

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openSUSE 13.1 Off to the Races

Susan Linton — Sat, 18 May 2013 03:23:01 GMT

The development cycle of openSUSE 13.1, codenamed "Bottle," was officially kicked off today when Andres Silva announced Milestone 1. He said, "As early version, it is expected that this Milestone is not fully functional or very stable. The most prominent changes in openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 1 come from the upgrades that packages are going through."

This release features Linux 3.9.0, Xorg X Server 1.14.1, GCC 4.7, GNOME 3.8.1, and KDE 4.10.2. It also ships with LibreOffice 4.0.2, Firefox 20, and GIMP 2.8.4. Future plans for 13.1 include upgrading GCC to 4.8, testing kmscom, and finish moving everything to systemd (completely removing SysVinit and initscripts). mkinitrd would then be replaced with Dracut. AppArmor will be "promoted further as a preferred security suite" and SELinux will be dusted off and oiled up. GNOME will be upgraded to 3.10 and get a green theme to display as default. KDE should be the latest 4.11.x release possible and will lose Kopete for Telepathy (so getting Phonon to support GStreamer 1.0 is also on the menu).

openSUSE 13.1 Release Schedule

* 2013-05-16: Milestone 1
* 2013-06-13: Milestone 2
* 2013-07-11: Milestone 3
* 2013-08-08: Milestone 4
* 2013-08-12: Stabilization Freeze
* 2013-09-01: Toolchain Freeze
* 2013-09-19: Beta 1
* 2013-10-07: Pre-Release Freeze
* 2013-10-10: Release Candidate 1
* 2013-10-31: Release Candidate 2
* 2013-11-08: Gold Master
* 2013-11-19: General Availability

Get your copy of Milestone 1 at openSUSE.org.

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Mozilla Needs More Time Before Blocking Third-Party Cookies By Default

Sam Dean — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:00:22 GMT

After much public discussion of the issue, Mozilla has decided to postpone blocking of third-party cookies by default in the next version of Firefox. As noted in this post, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) had raised a major stink over the issue, citing "the impact the ban would have on small Internet publishers, which depend on such cookie technology to sell advertising to niche audience segments." According to Mozilla's Brendan Eich, though, Mozilla just needs more time to implement the technology.

Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, writes in a blog post:

"There are many conflicting claims about how this patch will affect the Internet. Why debate in theory what we can measure in practice? We are going to find out more and adjust course as needed...We have heard important feedback from concerned site owners. We are always committed to user privacy, and remain committed to shipping a version of the patch that is 'on' by default. We are mindful that this is an important change; we always knew it would take a little longer than most patches as we put it through its paces. For those who read this as Mozilla softening our stance on protecting privacy and putting users first, in a word: no."

According to Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of IAB, in a statement: “This move will not put the interest of users first. Nor does it promote transparency or ‘move the web forward’ as Mozilla claims in its announcement. It will not advance Mozilla Corporation’s objective, as stated in its bylaws, of ‘promoting choice and innovation on the internet,’ but will, instead, impede both."

Mozilla had planned to release the third-party cookie blocking as "on by default" in Firefox 22, but it now looks like the scheme will take more time. In particular, Eich has pointed out that false positives and false negatives can arise when trying to determine which kinds of Internet content should be blocked.

Firefox won't be the first browser to block cookies by default, once the kinks are worked out. Apple's Safari browser already does so.

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Is Patenting Open Source Software The New Normal?

Sam Dean — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:46:08 GMT

In an interesting new Outercurve Foundation blog post from Penn State professor Clark Asay, he discusses "the tactic of patenting open source software to guard against patent trolls and the weaponization of corporate patent portfolios...gaining momentum in the FOSS community." Depending on who you talk to, the practice of patenting open source creations is either poison or an obvious requirement in a competitive world. There is a lot of gray area in this space, though, ranging from copyleft protections to other strategies that project protectors can pursue.

From potential issues with licenses to controlling the future development of a particular project, there are many risks to consider before deciding on whether to patent open source software. Of course, Google, Red Hat and many respected contributors to open source have been pursuing patents on open source software in recent times.

According to Asay's post:

"[A] recent proposal advocating adoption of a 'Defensive Patent License' has urged open innovation communities to more diligently obtain patents for defensive purposes. Some companies heavily involved in FOSS seem to be following this tactic. Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, for instance, was largely viewed as a quick means by which to obtain significant numbers of patents to help protect the Android ecosystem. Red Hat has also begun to build up a significant defensive patent portfolio."

"One of the primary advantages of FOSS development is its decentralized nature. While FOSS communities often have hierarchies and power players, the general development model allows diverse contributors to collectively and efficiently create software. As such, in many cases it may be difficult to determine who the inventor of any given inventive concept actually is. And patents require inventors to be specified. In some cases, especially in projects where one contributor is the primary contributor to the project, this may not be an issue. But in highly collaborative projects, where each contributor is adding some incremental piece to a larger inventive concept, it almost certainly is."

Aside from these issues of practicality, of course, some members of the FOSS community simply object to the whole patent system and see open source as an oasis that exists separately from it. Even for true open source purists, though, there are still options for protecting open source creations, especially when it comes to licensing protections.

Copyleft is the famous practice of using copyright law to give the right to distribute copies and modified versions of an open source creation while requiring that the same rights are preserved in any modified versions of the creation. The idea behind copyleft was described in Richard Stallman's GNU Manifesto in 1983.

We've also covered the Unlicense here. As Joe Brockmeier noted in that post:

"Some developers are embracing the Unlicense, a license that 'disclaims' copyright interest in a piece of code altogether. If the BSD, MIT, or WTFPL aren't Free enough for you, the Unlicense should fit the bill. The Unlicense is a very short (four paragraphs, not counting a link back to the site for the original text) license that states the software is released into the public domain, and that anyone is free to use it for any purpose...."

The Unlicense may seem similar to tossing code out into the wild with no license, but it actually introduces a way to track the "chain of custody" of a given open source software project.

Asay's post on the topic of open source patents is worth reading. Among other proposals he makes, he speculates on whether disperse open source communities could band together behind patents, with clear messaging about who the original project "inventors" are. In any case, patents on open source software are here to stay, as valuable open source creations increasingly become strategic for profit-driven companies to align behind.

For much more on the legal aspects of protecting an open source project, see our post here.

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Linux Mint 15 Most Ambitious Release Ever

Susan Linton — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:24:12 GMT

Clement Lefebvre, Mint founder and lead, recently announced the public release of Linux Mint 15 Release Candidate. Mint 15 brings lots of fixes, two new tools, and several new features. In fact, Clem said, "Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project."

What's Coming in Mint 15?

The Mint Desktop Manager now has a choice of three "greeters." A new greeter for 15 supports code such as "HTML5, CSS, Javascript, [and] WebGL" and ships with several cool themes. The other greeters as well as the manager itself received a lot of bugfixes and improvements. The configuration has been updated and now "looks better and is more intuitive than before."

Two new original tools are introduced this release dubbed "Software Sources" and "Driver Manager." MintSources is a graphical software sources configuration tool with the ability to test mirrors to find the fastest one. "MintSources also features PPA, 3rd party repositories and authentication keys management."

New Software Sources tool

MintDrivers, or the new drivers manager, uses the Ubuntu back-end but Clem says it "looks a bit better." With it you can easily install proprietary code some find questionable. "Drivers are listed by package name, and their version are clearly stated (in the case of the nVidia drivers you can therefore choose according to a particular version instead of wondering what "current" or "updates" really mean)."

Other New Features include:

* Nemo updated to coordinate better with Cinnamon
* New Desklets (widgets for the desktop) and 1,075 commits for Cinnamon
* Cinnamon got its own screensaver
* All configuration tools are now in Cinnamon Settings
* New desktop "spices" interface
* GNOME fallback removed for Metacity
* MATE got a lot of code cleanup as well as 1800 commits
* Mint tools migrated to work with MATE
* The Software Manager got automatic pagination
* One can now search within particular categories in the Software Manager
* The Welcome screen got some bug fixes and appearance refresh
* New wallpapers, themes, splashes, etc.

See the announcement for download mirrors and torrent links. Check the release notes for known issues.

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Critical Linux Exploit In The Wild

Jon Buys — Fri, 17 May 2013 02:24:24 GMT

If you run servers that provide shell accounts, it’s time to take some preventive measures. At least it is if you are running kernel versions 2.6.37 to 3.8.8, or if you are running RHEL 6 or a clone like CentOS, then the bug was backported to 2.6.32. I ran the exploit myself in a test environment, and it works exactly as expected. Log in as a normal user, compile 100 or so lines of C code, run the executable and you’ve got a root shell. Scary stuff if you manage public shell accounts.

If the exploit is combined with compromising a daemon to gain restricted shell access, the attacker could use this code to remotely gain root access. I can generally get by reading C, but I have to admit that the exploit code is over my head. I can tell from the last two lines that the code sets the uid to zero (root), and returns a new /bin/bash shell. Packet Storm has the entire file available for examination.

This Red Hat Bugzilla thread has several good suggestions for mitigating the risk of your servers being compromized, and given the public attention this bug is now recieving, I expect a fix in the mainstream repositories to show up soon. However, it appears that the bug has existed since 2010, so this raises some important questions. If the bug has been in shipping code for nearly three years, how many servers have already been compromized? Can the full extent of the exploit be calculated? How can we take measures to avoid issues like this in the future?

The original timestamp for the exploit code was 2010, and was updated in 2013 when the bug was backported. One of the often touted benefits of open source software is that bugs get identified and fixed faster than their proprietary counterparts. I’d like to say I’m dissapointed in how this was handled, but in all honesty I can’t. As I stated previously, this code is over my head, so I can’t in good conscious falt anyone else for not catching it.

Reading more into the system I’m reminded of my recent explorations in containers using OpenVZ. I have not tested this yet, but I believe that even if the vulnerability is present in a container OS, the attacker should still be limited to root access inside his container. If anyone can confirm this I’d love to hear about it. Even if the privledge escalation is limited to a container, the overall effect could still be devastating, depending on how the application is architected. Do you keep keys, passphrases, or any client data on in the container? Once an attacker has root access to your box, it’s generally game over.

Personally, I see this as a mark in favor of FreeBSD jails. Not that the BSDs are immune to a similar type of attack, but they do seem to be few and far between. The overall architecture of runnign systems inside of severely restricted jails still looks like the right choice for nearly all environments.

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The Beginner's Guide to Inkscape

Sam Dean — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:04:31 GMT

In the open source community focused on graphics tools, GIMP gets a great deal of attention, and there are many free online resources available for it, but if you're in search of an open source illustration tool that can compete with Adobe Illustrator and is increasingly useds by designers for effects, logos and still graphics, give Inkscape a try.

Inkscape runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and is well-known as a powerful and flexible drawing and vector editing application. In this post, you'll find our newly updated collection of outstanding free resources for getting familiar with Inkscape's capabilities, and they'll help you get going quickly with the application.

While standard online tutorials for Inkscape have been online for a long time, video tutorials for the program have steadily improved. As a matter of fact, you can access entire playlists of short tutorial videos that show how to perform specific tasks in the application. Try this playlist out, for a start. You can also drill down for video tutorials on specific tasks, such as designing a logo, which Inkscape is perfect for.

Bethany Hiitola is the author of a popular book on Inkscape that is used by many web designers, and she has a very useful tutorial on the progam posted at the Packt site. It covers how vector graphics program works, walks through the many essential tools that Inkscape provides and more. It's a good first start if you're new to the program.

What can I do with Inkscape? Inkscape's site presents many galleries and screenshots showing what kinds of tasks it is good at. Here, you'll find examples of how it is used for web design, creating icons for applications, creating logos, adorning CD booklets, and more. The Inkscape Tutorials blog also has an outstanding collection of videos and posts illustrating what the program is capable of.

Getting up to speed. You can find several types of documentation for Inkscape here, including a free online book with individual chapters posted as links, here. There is also a keyboard and mouse reference here, and an Inkscape User Manual in progress here.

Our recommended guide. While the manuals referenced just above are more exhaustive, FLOSSManuals has by far the most accessible introduction to Inkscape's main features, found here. It begins with an introduction of the application's capabilities and moves on to individual discussions of how all the major tools in Inkscape work. You'll find links to the discussions of the tools running down the left rail of the online guide, and there are annotated screenshots to learn from, like the one seen below. Beginners can also get a lot out of this basic tutorial.

Inkscape is very useful, good for eye-catching graphics, and a lot of fun. If you haven't done so already, give it a try.

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Google Touts Big Share for Chrome, and New Voice Search Plans

Sam Dean — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:51:12 GMT

At this week's Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, announced that Chrome has reached the milestone of 750 million monthly users. This number is being misinterpreted by some to mean that 750 million people are using the Chrome browser on desktop computers.

Rather, Pichai cites the number as an aggregate metric representing users of the Chrome browser on all platforms including mobile devices such as phones, plus users of Chrome OS. Still, even taking that into account, it's a staggering number to consider, and it raises the question of whether Google's other new products and services can achieve dominance in their spaces. Among other plans, Google is ramping up voice search features for Chrome.

It's hard to believe how much success Google has had with its Chrome strategy in such a short period of time. Just how old is Chrome? You may be surprised to hear that the browser debuted as recently as December of 2008 (although a pre-release build was available a couple of months before that). The Chrome OS operating system came much later.

Pichai said at Google I/O that Chrome experienced nearly as much growth in the past year as it had in its lifetime leading up until 2012. He also noted that usage is picking for the browser on phones and tablets, and that Google is actively pursuing more partners for Chrome OS-based Chromebooks.

Among other notable news coming from Google I/O, Google is discussing ambitious new plans for voice search features, along the lines of what Apple's Siri does. As The Verge notes:

"Google has updated its voice search feature with what it calls a 'no-interface' approach for Chrome and Chrome OS. With the latest version of Google Search, saying 'OK Google' and asking a question will prompt it to respond, with no button presses needed. Like Siri or previous voice searches, users can ask a question with natural language, and Google's Knowledge Graph will parse the question, giving a voice response and showing results."

Although the voice search features are just demos for now, Google has confirmed that it will arrive for the Chrome browser, Chrome OS and Android soon. According to some reports, Google is seeking to go way beyond what Apple has done with Siri.

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KDE 4.11 Beginning to Take Shape

Susan Linton — Thu, 16 May 2013 02:00:52 GMT

It's been just a week since KDE 4.10.3 was announced, but 4.11 is already reaching its first milestone freeze. TSDgeos reminded developers today that the 4.11 Soft Feature Freeze happens in just one more week. What does that mean for users?

Soft feature freeze mean developers have to have any new feature plans on the official Feature Plans list. So, any new little goody not listed at that time will have to wait for another release. They'll have two weeks to get their code ready because after the June 5 Hard Feature Freeze, only bug fix commits are allowed. What this means for you is, we can get an idea what might be included in KDE 4.11.

Some of the early features planned for 4.11 include:

* Up & down buttons added to Menu Editor for usability
* Ability to sort entries in sub-menus
* Notifications configuration button
* Lots of cool plugins for Kate
* Juk is getting Ogg Opus support
* Marble to receive interface, plugin, and map attention
* Several Plasma Add-ons are being rewritten in QML
* Konsole might see --separate option
* A quick preview feature is planned for Dolphin
* KWin to get Plasma theme refresh and removal of legacy themes
* Lots and lots more TO DO.

Beta 1 is scheduled for June 12 and Beta 2 June 26. RC1 is due July 10 and RC2 July 24. KDE 4.11 is planned for release on August 14, 2013. We'll check in on the progress of planned features after the Hard Feature Freeze.

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The New Yorker's Strongbox Anonymity Application Has Some Notable Roots

Sam Dean — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:08:49 GMT

The late web activist Aaron Swartz was famous for a number of things, but not everybody realizes that he created an anonymous electronic tip box application at the request of Wired magazine's Kevin Poulsen. In fact, you can read Poulsen's account of the story here. The New Yorker magazine is leveraging the tool, called Strongbox, to help its journalists and tipsters stay anonymous, and the code for the application is available under an open source license.

The New Yorker's Strongbox is available here. According to the magazine's editors:

"Strongbox is a new way for you to share information, messages, and files with our writers and editors and is designed to provide you with a greater degree of anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail. To help protect your anonymity, Strongbox is only accessible using the Tor network (https://www.torproject.org)."

We've covered Tor numerous times here on OStatic. It's one of the primary free resources used worldwide for those who want to surf the web anonymously, and is ideal for usage in whistleblowing applications.

According to Poulsen's account of how Swartz's tool was created:

"His co-creation of an anonymity project called Tor2Web, is what I had in mind when I approached him with the secure-submission notion. He agreed to do it with the understanding that the code would be open-source—licensed to allow anyone to use it freely—when we launched the system."

Swartz apparently committed suicide before he could advance his anonymity-for-tipsters creation, but it is good news that it is finding applications now. According to Poulsen's account, Swartz willed all his intellectual property to Sean Palmer, who has given Strongbox his blessing.

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Firefox 21 Arrives, Featuring Health Reports, More Social Features

Sam Dean — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:50:37 GMT

Version 21 of Mozilla's Firefox browser is out for Windows, the Mac, Linux and Android. You can download the standard browser here, and get Firefox for Android here. If you're already a Firefox user, you should be automatically upgraded. There are quite a few enhancements in this version, including additional Do Not Track features, a Health report, social APIs and choices on the desktop and open source fonts for the Android version.

Mozilla has been developing Firefox's Social API for some time now. It's intended as an invitation to developers to build social tools and services that will work with the browser, and I covered it in-depth here. Mozilla has a whole Developer Network page available with complete documentation on the new Social API. In Firefox 21, Mozilla has enhanced the list of partners using the Social API. The additions include Cliqz, Mixi, and MSN Now.

Firefox's Health Report is designed to give details on how your browser is performing and may be welcomed by many users of the browser who have experienced memory usage problems. Do you use the same browser across multiple devices? Have you ever been perplexed at how, say, a particular version of Firefox might offer perfect, fast performance on one computer, but the same version is pokey and prone to crashing on another comparable computer? The Health Report can help you troubleshoot these problems across various instances of Firefox on various devices. You can access the Health Report by typing "about:healthreport" into the Firefox address bar or as a drop-down selection under the the "Firefox > Help" menu.

According to a FAQ Mozilla has put up about the Health Report, it gives users real-time information about browser configuration and status, but will also help Mozilla tune and develop future Firefox versions.

There is a lot to like in the new version of the browser, and yes, there are performance enhancements. The full changelog for version 21 is found here.

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Antergos Erases Cinnarch with Inaugural Release

Susan Linton — Wed, 15 May 2013 03:10:23 GMT

It was just little over a month ago that the Linux community learned that Cinnarch developers were giving up on using Cinnamon as their default desktop because Mint was "1 year behind with upstream code." With that a name-change would also be needed and 93% of the community agreed. Then yesterday, the Cinnarch phoenix reemerged as Antergos, with a new release.

The announcement explains that the new name Antergos is "a galician word to link the past with the present." It seems the name change is complete across the distribution and community and Cinnarch will forevermore, until further notice, be known as Antergos.

Besides the name change, it seems the biggest change is in the installer, which now provides a choice of desktop/window environments. GNOME 3 is now default, but Cinnamon is still offered along with Xfce and Razor-qt. KDE is noticeably missing from that list, thank you very much, but it seems that KDE is installed automagically if one chooses Razor-qt (using KWin window manager). The installer saw several other changes too, such as new artwork, a number of bugfixes, and one other new feature (autologin configuration).

For user of Cinnarch, further instructions for configuring their rolling distro's package manager and what to install to convert your install to Antergos are also included in the announcement. New ISOs were released for fresh installs. Antergos ships with Linux 3.9.2, Xorg Server 1.14.1, GCC 4.8.0 is installable, and GNOME 3.8.1.

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Unix Architecture Showing it's Age

Jon Buys — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:54:17 GMT

High Scalability has a fascinating article up that summarizes a talk by Robert Graham of Errata Security, summarizing the development choices needed to support 10 million concurrent connections on a single server. From a small data center perspective, the numbers he is talking about seem astronomical, but not unbelievable. With a new era of Internet connected devices dawning the time may have come to question the core architecture of Unix, and therefore Linux and BSD as well.

The core of the talk seems to be that the kernel is too inefficient in how it handles threads and packets to maintain the speed and scalability requirements for web scale computing. Graham recommends moving as much of the data processing as possible away from the kernel and into the application. This means writing device drivers, handling threading and multiple cores, and allocating memory yourself. Graham uses the example of scaling Apache to illustrate how depending on the operating system can actually slow the application when handling several thousand connections per second.

Why? Servers could not handle 10K concurrent connections because of O(n^2) algorithms used in the kernel.

Two basic problems in the kernel:

Connection = thread/process. As a packet came in it would walk down all 10K processes in the kernel to figure out which thread should handle the packet

Connections = select/poll (single thread). Same scalability problem. Each packet had to walk a list of sockets.

Solution: fix the kernel to make lookups in constant time

Threads now constant time context switch regardless of number of threads.

Came with a new scalable epoll()/IOCompletionPort constant time socket lookup.

The talk touches on a concept I’ve been mulling over for months, the inherent complexity of modern data centers. If you are virtualizing, and you probably are, for your application to get to the hardware there are most likely several layers of abstraction that need to be unpacked before the code it is trying to execute actually gets to the CPU, or the data is written to disk. Does virtualization actually solve the problem we have, or is it an approach built from spending far too long in the box? That Graham’s solution for building systems that scale for the next decade is to bypass the OS entirely and talk directly to the network and hardware tells me that we might be seeing the first slivers of dusk for the kernel’s useful life serving up web applications.

So what would come after Linux? It is possible that researchers in the UK have come up with a solution with Mirage. In a paper quoted on the High Scaleablity site the researchers describe Mirage:

Our prototype (dubbed Mirage) is unashamedly academic; it extends the Objective Caml language with storage extensions and a custom run-time to emit binaries that execute as a guest operating system under Xen.

Mirage is, as stated, very academic, and currently very alpha quality, but the idea is compelling. Writing applications that compile directly to a complete machine, something that runs independently without an operating system. Of course, the first objection that comes to mind is that this would lead to writing for specialized hardware, and would mean going back in time thirty years. However, combining a next generation language with a project like [Open Compute] would provide open specifications and community driven development at a low level, ideal for eking out as much performance as possible from the hardware.

No matter which way the industry turns to solve the upcoming challenges of an exploding Internet, the next ten years are sure to be a wild ride.

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