In these last two months, Ryan’s project has gone through a few changes, not least of which a name change to Peer.fm at the request of current Napster owner Rhapsody. We were recently able to work our way into Ryan’s busy schedule to ask a few questions about the past, present, and future, of this interesting and somewhat controversial service.

Ryan Lester

The Powerbase: Ryan, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. To start off, can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and your background?

Ryan: Sure Tom, and thanks for your interest in Peer.fm!

I’m a software engineer by trade, currently taking some time off from Carnegie Mellon to work at SpaceX. I can’t really talk about SpaceX without violating the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, but it’s pretty dope.

I started programming at 15, in the summer of 2007, when my friend Josh (current roommate/co-worker) convinced me to start learning Python with him – though by that time I had already become decently proficient in Bash, which in retrospect I’d more accurately consider to be my first language. From there, I started taking CS classes at school later that year and experimenting on personal projects.

The Powerbase: When did you first become interested in Linux and open source?

Ryan: I first picked up Linux as my daily driver back when I was 14, starting with Ubuntu Edgy. I’d already been using some open source software like Firefox, though, and had been at least vaguely interested in learning more about Linux/FOSS for a while.

Peer.fm

The Powerbase: You’ve recently gone live with Peer.fm (previously, Napster.fm), and it’s already generated quite a bit of buzz. What makes Peer.fm different from the options that are already out there? Why should people be excited about it?

Ryan:

1. It has some cool social features that aren’t all present in its competitors: real-time syncing, real-time view of music played by all other users (“Discovery”), browsing of friends’ libraries (“Hot List”), sharing tracks (“Transfer”), IRC-like chat (“Chat”)
   
2. Completely free (as in beer and freedom)
3. Available everywhere on Earth (cf. Spotify’s geographic availability)
4. Automatically translated into users’ native languages

The Powerbase:  Rhapsody requested you change the name of the service, since they own the rights to the original Napster. How was the exchange between you and Rhapsody? Was this your first cease and desist notice?

Ryan: The dispute with Rhapsody isn’t fully resolved at the moment, so I can’t comment on that, but this wasn’t my first cease and desist; I received one from the Wikimedia Foundation last year as well after buying wikpeidia.org (note the misspelling) and hosting fictional articles about some friends at the domain as a joke.

Also, while I wasn’t technically the one to receive the cease and desist in this case, I did leak Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes a couple years ago.

The Powerbase: Do you regret originally naming the project after Napster? Or do you think it helped get Peer.fm the attention it need to get started?

Ryan: Definitely don’t regret it at all; I don’t think there’s any way it would have grabbed the same level of initial attention without the Napster association.

YouTube Backend

The Powerbase: Peer.fm gets its music from YouTube, which frees it up from the responsibility of hosting potentially illegal tracks. But on the other hand, being beholden to YouTube and its content could be a problem in the long run. Do you worry about a future where Google might actively fight the use of Peer.fm?

Ryan: I’ve actually fairly recently received an email from YouTube’s legal department requesting that I display the source video somewhere in my UI (with which I have complied). Other than that, I’m not worried about further interference.

The source YouTube video is now embedded in Peer.fm

What could be a potential problem, though, as you mentioned in your original article, is copyright-holders seeing the existence of Peer.fm as greater incentive to actively pursue the removal of infringing works from YouTube.

Open Source Protection

The Powerbase: Putting Peer.fm up on GitHub and licensing it as GPLv3 gives it built-in protection from anyone who might try and shut it down; it will never be possible to completely remove it from the Internet. Do you think this sort of protection through open source could have saved the original Napster?

Ryan: Possibly, though not to the same degree as I believe it could Peer.fm in the hypothetical event of a shutdown. While Napster did use P2P as a means of providing music to users, Napster’s infrastructure as described by Jordan Mendelson (Chief Architect of Napster) relied on some fairly complex server-side gymnastics and a pretty hefty centralized data store. If Napster were to have outlived its legal troubles through open source, it would have involved a third party putting in the work to replicate their backend deployment (ideally with a copy of their database, though starting from scratch would have been a viable option) and achieving a modicum of success under non-infringing branding while avoiding the same fate Napster met.

By the time Napster shut down in July of 2001, an armada of roughly interchangeable products had already launched (KaZaA, LimeWire, Morpheus, BearShare, etc.). I’m not sure of the degree to which its competitors of the time shared Napster’s social features, but even assuming they had nothing comparable, it’s not certain that those features would have been sufficient to give a reincarnated Napster the edge against KaZaA and LimeWire without its former momentum or brand appeal – and even if they were, its competitors could have chosen to take advantage of the open source code and negate that edge.

The devil is in the details, and Peer.fm has a number of significant factors in favor of its resilience against potential shutdown:

1. Peer.fm itself is 100% client-side, which radically simplifies the process of standing up an identical clone; anyone can pull the code from GitHub and either run it locally or host it publicly with no extra effort (aside from changing the name/logo).
   
2. Peer.fm’s data/content is entirely managed and stored by completely separate and perfectly legitimate services (Firebase, Discogs, YouTube). Because of this, even if Peer.fm were sued into oblivion or acquired and I were to end up in prison or working for a company that had no intention of letting the service continue to exist, any Peer.fm clone would suffer no loss of data or interoperability.
3. Peer.fm’s music collection isn’t subject to the same sort of chicken-and-egg problem a reincarnated Napster (or any new P2P network) would face; whereas a P2P network depends on its users to provide its content, Peer.fm could provide the same music whether it had one user or one million users.

Just to clarify, though, this is all really a moot point as far as Peer.fm is concerned, since (unlike Napster) Peer.fm isn’t directly facilitating illegal activity.

The Powerbase: In a similar vein, Peer.fm’s open nature means you’ll never be able to truly rid the project of its original name; people can continue to distribute it as Napster.fm if they chose. Do you think this might become a problem? Do you believe Rhapsody understands the intricacies of the situation?

Ryan: Well, I could see it being a minor annoyance for Rhapsody, but I don’t consider it a problem for me at all. As far as whether Rhapsody fully understands the situation, I think so (I’ve seen no reason to believe otherwise); it shouldn’t be an issue for their legal department to send similar notices to the one I received when/if they become aware of infringing Peer.fm clones.

The Powerbase: GitHub currently shows Peer.fm having 27 forks. Have you been surprised by the reaction to the release of the source code so far?

Ryan: Well, I never expected Peer.fm to receive the initial attention that it did in the first place, so in that sense I certainly didn’t expect the reaction that the source code release received. As far as the reaction to the source code given the reaction to the product as a precondition, I haven’t been particularly surprised, though I do like that people have been taking advantage of the GitHub Issues system a little more than I’d expected.

The Powerbase: You mention on the Peer.fm site that you’re looking for contributors. Has Peer.fm’s recent popularity surge sent some developers your way yet?

Ryan: I received two pull requests with fixes for minor styling issues. Otherwise, nope.

The Future

The Powerbase: Do you think the days of storing music on our local devices is behind us? Do you see streaming as the future of digital music?

Ryan: No, I wouldn’t say so at all; at a minimum, as solid state storage capacities continue to increase (to the point at which local storage can be universally assumed to be cheaper than bandwidth), I think we should start to see aggressive local caching à la Spotify Offline Mode become the default.

Besides, even once Internet access begins to approach ubiquity on Earth, I’m not sure the Martian colonists will appreciate interplanetary latency in their Peer.fm playlists .

The Powerbase: Any particular areas where you’d like to improve Peer.fm, or where outside help would be most appreciated?

Ryan:

• Real-time syncing between users is a little glitchy at times
• Notifications of new chat messages and scrolling to bottom of chat windows when new messages are received
• Occasionally, when loading Peer.fm, an unintended line break will appear between the play button and the track slider; a refresh usually makes this go away, but it’s mildly annoying that I haven’t found a workaround yet (it seems like a timing issue in the Google Closure slider class)
• Probably other minor issues

The Powerbase: What can we expect from Peer.fm in the near future? Any new features or improvements you have in mind?

Ryan: I’ve admittedly barely had time to touch the code since the end of April, but when I do pick back up where I left off, I plan to focus on the following:

• iTunes import
  
• Last.fm scrobbling
• Multiple playlists (as opposed to one library per account)
• Sharing of playlists (i.e. Hot List extended to support multiple playlists rather than just one library per user)
• Live streaming of U.S. phone calls through the PRISM REST API
• Mobile support

Thanks to Ryan Lester from taking time away from literal rocket science to speak with us. Good luck to Ryan and the whole team at SpaceX.

Developer 2D Boy found great success with their first release, World of Goo.  The game received high praise all around and won numerous awards.  Their latest release, Little Inferno, may not turn quite as many heads, but it does give you an experience you’re not going to find in any other game.

Gameplay

The first that should be noted about Little Inferno is that it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a game.  Yes, there are puzzles of sorts to solve and there is an ending to reach for, but Little Inferno feels more like a digital toy box than an actual game. The ‘gameplay’ consists of burning items to receive money to buy more items to burn; while the occasional narrative bits jump in while playing.  There are a number of combos to find which involve burning certain items together.  These combos are only hinted at by there names (early example: the combo “Spring Time” has you burn an alarm clock and a packet of flowers together.) While the premise of the game may seem boring to some, it’s the mixture of simplicity and 2D Boy‘s visual style that make Little Inferno something worth checking out.

Story

The story behind Little Inferno introduces us to a world that is experiencing the start of some sort of ice age. It’s getting colder and nobody knows why.  As society begins to decline, many people are left with no other option but to burn their belongings in order to stay alive.  Rather than trying to find a solution, Tomorrow Corporation, uses this situation to market their latest children’s toy: The Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace. As the jingle says “The world is getting colder, but there’s no need for alarm.  Just sit by your fire, burn all of your toys and stay warm.”

Playing with your new Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace is quite simple. By dragging items from your inventory at the bottom you can set up formations of different items to have them burn more effectively. Once you have your items set just click and hold anywhere in the fire place and set your toys ablaze.  After each item is thoroughly burned you are awarded money to buy more from your catalogs as well as Tomorrow Tickets that help speed up the delivery process for your items. It’s this simple and basic gameplay that make Little Inferno easy for anyone to pick and and play.

Visual Style

2D Boy‘s art style is really only comparable to that of a disturbed child.  While at times they can create nice colorful landscapes, it’s true character shows with it’s stark and gritty simplicity.  It’s this style that creates a sort of feeling of ambivalence as these faces stare at you with a smile that is anything but genuine.  This visual style also works well when it’s used in a game about setting things on fire.  Other than a scene at the conclusion of the game, you spend the entire time staring at the fireplace, so Little Inferno is far from the varied sceneries from World of Goo. Instead, you get around 140 different items to play with, each having there own personality (Though you typically don’t get to see any of it until they are a few seconds away from being a pile of ash.)

The visual effects of the fire itself is something noteworthy. This is easily the biggest pull of the entire game.  After you have set your items up, the only thing left for you to do is to burn them up. Once the fire catches, all you really need to do is sit back and watch. So many other games out there try to make realistic fire in their games and some do an admirable job, but I have yet to see a game that made fire that looks this realistic. It’s this focus on something as simple as realistic flame physics that make this game really worth playing around with.

Audio

Of course, the fire wouldn’t quite feel as real if it didn’t have proper audio effects.  Fortunately, the crackle and seething of the fire matches almost perfectly to help further the realism of the fire. On the other end though, the sounds of the fire is really the high point of Little Inferno’s soundtrack.  While playing with the fireplace, you have no music other than the muffled noises coming from outside of your house.  The only times you get to hear any tunes are when reading mail or ordering new items from the catalogs. It is a shame, 2D Boy does have a good taste in music and the few songs that are in the game are decent (with the main menu screen music being really good in this writer’s opinion,) but they are just few and far between.

Conclusion

Overall, Little Inferno is a fun and often relaxing experience that only really suffers from a lack of content as well as motivation. The game is quite short and can be completed in under 3 hours.  You can spend more time trying to find all of the combos but there isn’t really any payoff in doing so.  The ending to the game is interesting but getting there does require a lot of repetitive gameplay.  Having said that, anyone out there who may have been or still is a pyro should find this to be a nice and safe alternative.

]]> http://www.thepowerbase.com/2013/06/little-inferno-for-linux-review/feed/ 2 http://www.thepowerbase.com/2013/05/vivaldi-tablet-finally-almost-finalized/ http://www.thepowerbase.com/2013/05/vivaldi-tablet-finally-almost-finalized/#comments Thu, 30 May 2013 12:37:44 +0000 Dean Howell http://www.thepowerbase.com/?p=6990 Per Aaron Seigo, the once-hotly anticipated –and still hotly-anticipated-by-me — Vivaldi tablet is in the very final stages of design.  Many of the necessary components are in place and the new design belongs almost entirely to the Plasma Active team.  Many of you might remember that we’ve covered Plasma Active and the Vivaldi tablet quite a bit when it was a hot topic.  We even went so far as to purchase the reference hardware that most closely resembled the Vivaldi tablet.  Aaron will have you think that was only months ago, and he’s not lying, but those months are now dangerously close to turning into years.

Do we care?  Heck no!  We want this thing, and we’re more than a little excited to know what exactly the upgraded specs are.  Today we learned that the device is now dual-core and sports a better screen, but anything above and beyond that is a little bit of a mystery still.

From Aaron’s blog:

Which means we are finally, after months of unexpected delays (it’s amazing how many different ways a PCB can be done in not-quite-the-right way …) we have production designs in the box. We’re not quite at the point where we can send them shuffling off the production line into little boxes to send to you, but we actually have a device that works and whose design we own so that our ability to deliver is in our own hands.

During this time we’ve moved our focus from the single core SoC to a pin-compatible dual core version to keep up with the times a bit as well as brought a better screen into the mix. I would like to post official specs but I don’t want to tempt fate into changing anything on us as a result. See how projects like this can turn an otherwise secular minded person superstitious?

What working?

• SoC PCBs: done
• Mer: booting
• Plasma Active: starts
• X11: running, still toying with opengl
• Still waiting on a pair of drivers
• Casework being tweaked to smooth out some rough edges
• Screen components: sourced and ready

Thank you

We’d like to thank Aaron in the sincerest way possible for not only causing us to drool over this device again, but also for his frank — if not also a bit mysterious — update.  It looks like no promises will be broken this go ’round and no hearts will be broken.

Aaron, you should be expecting an email from us begging you for a review unit when everything is final.  No other publication is in heat for this thing like we are.

Source | aseigo.blogspot.com

Planetary Resources (the company which has vowed to turn asteroid mining from science fiction to a viable business) has started a campaign for the ARKYD, a commercial space telescope which will not only help search the skies for potentially dangerous (and valuable) asteroids, but open up space to the public on an absolutely unprecedented scale.

ARKYD

Planetary Resources is looking for $1 Million USD to develop, launch, and maintain the ARKYD space telescope. The ARKYD (named for the fictional company in the Star Wars universe that built planet and asteroid detecting probes, such as the one the Empire used to find the planet Hoth) will be an extremely small spacecraft, roughly the size of a shoebox and weighing in at 15kg (around 33 pounds), carrying an actively stabilized 5 megapixel camera with a 200 mm aperture.

Engineers working on the ARKYD prototype.

While the telescope may be small, it has the extreme advantage of operating outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, orbiting at 300 to 450 miles (around 100 miles higher than the International Space Station). Operating at this altitude eliminates the image distortion which limits the capabilities of even the largest terrestrial telescopes. It will also be able to operate 24 hours a day, as it won’t need to wait until night time to begin its operations.

Open Access

While the primary goal of the ARKYD will be to find the asteroids that Planetary Resources eventually intends to mine, its secondary function will be to serve as the world’s first “public” space telescope. Anyone who pledges $200 or more during the Kickstarter campaign will be able to request an image of any celestial body, which will be added to the ARKYD’s queue and delivered digitally to the user.

For pledges of $1,750, a school, university, or museum will have access to the ARKYD’s main optics for 10 separate images, receive an educational curriculum designed by Planetary Resources, and an educational poster that explains the technology which makes the ARKYD possible.

This level of access to a space telescope is completely unparalleled. Never before has it been possible for the public, much less an individual, to directly control a spacecraft of this type. Space telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, have always been the domain of world superpowers. To build and operate one at this cost, and to then turn around and allow the general public to have a say in what it images, is a complete game changer in the way space astronomy is performed.

If the ARKYD is successful, the potential scientific impact is absolutely staggering. The Hubble has captured some of the most impressive astronomical images in history, and has helped scientists learn more about our universe than perhaps any other instrument humanity has built.

But how much more could the Hubble have taught us if every university in the world had a chance to control it for a brief time? What if the public had access to the raw images from the telescope, rather than the processed “glamour shots” NASA releases from the Hubble?

Space Selfies

A Space Selfie from the ARKYD

While perhaps not quite as awe-inspiring on a scientific level, the ARKYD offers another extremely unique opportunity for Kickstarter supporters: the ability to take a picture of themselves in space.

By using a novel arrangement of a external screen and a small camera mounted on a boom, the ARKYD is able to display an image of the user’s choosing and then take a photo of that image with the Earth in the background.

For only $25, you can have your own orbital “Selfie” taken by the ARKYD, which is pretty cheap considering the technology involved. A few extra dollars will get you a printed version of the image, and a few more bumps the resolution up.

Will It Fly?

Of course, that’s the most important question: will the ARKYD actually get built and launched?

While nothing is certain, it seems pretty likely that the Kickstarter campaign will be a massive success (they are approaching $250,000 raised out of their $1,000,000 goal, and it hasn’t even been 24 hours yet), and Planetary Resources has big name backing to provide the rest of the funding.

Even so, space missions are perhaps the hardest thing we as a species can attempt, and there are thousands of things that can go wrong. Even if everything goes according to plan and the ARKYD gets built, it could be lost due to a malfunction during launch that would be completely out of Planetary Resources’s hands.

There is definitely inherent risk in a project like this, but it’s a risk worth taking. As other commercial space ventures (such as SpaceX) have learned, there is a world of possibilities if you bring access to space down to the level where the average citizen can participate; you just need to take that first leap and make it possible.

• Added support for the following GPUs:
  • GeForce GTX 780

• Fixed a regression that could cause X to crash when querying GPU information through NV-CONTROL on multi-GPU systems where some GPUs failed to be initialized for X.

• Fixed a bug that could cause X to crash when using Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs) with indirect rendering.

• Fixed a bug that prevented some drop-down menus in nvidia-settings from working correctly when using older versions of GTK+.

• Fixed RandR panning reporting when the current MetaMode is smaller than the X screen.

• Fixed a regression that caused nvidia-installer to attempt post-processing of non-installed files.

• Added the “ForceCompositionPipeline” and “ForceFullCompositionPipeline” MetaMode options. See the README for details.

• Added support for HDMI 4K resolutions. Using a 4K resolution with an HDMI display requires a Kepler or later GPU.

• Added support in VDPAU for 4k resolution MPEG-1/2 and H.264 video decoding, up to 4032×4048 for MPEG-1/2 and 4032×4080 for H.264, and up to 65536 macroblocks for both.

For home theater enthusiast, the most compelling feature of this new driver is support for decoding video at 4k resolutions with VDPAU.  Compelling is about all that it is however, considering that it’s unlikely any of you have genuine, 4k video occupying 200GB of your disk space that you need to view on Linux.  Though, we could be wrong.

There is one astonishing omission however; HDMI audio has been broken on Nvidia cards since Kernel 3.8.  Those who were looking for, at best, a hotfix, have been left out in the cold.

Pidora 18 (Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix) Release

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 Release Announcement

Who you callin’ a Pidora?

Unfortunately, while Pidora looks to be a very interesting distribution for the Raspberry Pi, with many features taking advantage of the board’s unique properties, the Fedora team made one critical error during its development: they forgot to Google their intended name.

As it turns out, Pidora has a rather embarrassing meaning to some members of the community: in Russian, “pidora” is a derogatory word for a male homosexual. It’s closest translation into English would be “faggot”.

This coincidence was pointed out immediately via various social networks, and most users seemed to accept it as a fluke. Still, the Pidora maintainers have felt the situation serious enough to add a page to the official Wiki about it:

It has come to our attention that the Pidora name bears an unfortunate similarity to another word in Russian, and this has offended some community members and amused others.

Please accept our apologies for any offence caused. Our goal was to simply associate “Pi” (from Raspberry Pi) and “Fedora” (from the Fedora Project).

We are actively seeking a broadly-acceptable alternative Russian name in consultation with some community members, and will post more information shortly.

-Chris Tyler

Pidora Wiki

It will be interesting to see how this is handled moving forward, as releasing Pidora under a completely different name in Russia seems both awkward and ineffectual.

I an addition to being quite possibly the oldest Debian developer, he was also an occasional contributor to Wikipedia.  In addition, Dassen has frequently given talks regarding free and open source software and has been published in many texts and journals since 1999.

Ray had this to say about software patents, non-free software, propaganda, and himself.

I think software patents are evil and try to educate people about them, e.g. by pointing them to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, the League for Programming Freedom, and freepatents.

I’m a hacker, in particular of free software.

I educate people on the all too common misuse of the term hacker to mean cracker.

I advocate free speech.  Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign!

I think cryptography is useful as a means of protecting privacy and providing authentication when needed.

Debian had this to say about Ray and his extraordinary contributions:

 Ray was a Debian Developer for an incredible 19 years. He joined the project in 1994, and continued to be an active contributor until recently. He was involved in Debian as a maintainer of several packages, particularly Gnumeric, and was a driving force behind the creation of the Debian Gnome team.

The Debian Project honours Ray’s great work and his strong dedication to Debian and Free Software. His technical knowledge and his ability to share that knowledge with others will be missed. His contributions will not be forgotten, and the high standards of his work will continue to serve as an inspiration to others.

As of this time, the cause of Ray Dassen’s death is unknown.  All of us at the Powerbase would like to lend our gravest condolences to Dassen’s friends and family, and the community that he has left behind.

Source | Debian.org

Ray Dassen’s Homepage

Developer of the mega-successful casual strategy gem World of Goo is back, and this time they’ve brought Linux along for the first ride!  Tomorrow Corporation‘s much anticipated, already award-winning indie game Little Inferno is now available in the Humble Store, and we can’t wait to play it!

So, what’s this Little Inferno game all about??

Here is the description from Tomorrow Corporation.

Congratulations on your new Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace!  Throw your toys into your fire, and play with them as they burn. Stay warm in there. It’s getting cold outside!

Burn flaming logs, screaming robots, credit cards, batteries, exploding fish, unstable nuclear devices, and tiny galaxies. An adventure that takes place almost entirely in front of a fireplace – about looking up up up out of the chimney, and the cold world just on the other side of the wall.

Finally, a toy burning simulator with Katamari Damacy like ridiculousness!

Interested in a copy for yourself?  Head on over to the Humble Store now!  $10 is probably a small price to pay for this one, and while it is also available in the Steam store, we’re having a hard time finding the Linux version there.

Source | Tomorrow Corporation

Via | Gaming on Linux

Buy Little Inferno | Humble Store | Steam

While GNU/Hurd is still not considered production-ready, and may not even get there, we are still amazed to see releases after 23 years of development!  In fact, our imaginations tell us that development is a lot like one person working a loom at 1/4 normal speed, trying to make a blanket to wrapped the earth with.  What’s even more amazing is that development continues even though Richard Stallman is not optimistic that it will ever be completed.

Stallman on Hurd:

I have done most of my work while anxious about whether I could do the job, and unsure that it would be enough to achieve the goal if I did. But I tried anyway, because there was no one but me between the enemy and my city. Surprising myself, I have sometimes succeeded.

From the announcement:

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

Compatibility (in general)

Astonishingly, Debian GNU/Hurd is compatible with %75 of all the packages available for Debian Sid (about 10,000!!).  On the flip-side of the coin, GNU/Hurd is only available for i386 systems which are a bit of a rarity these days.  Debian is known for its wide support for different architectures going way back to the Motorola 68k.  Though it should be noted; this is not an official Debian release…

Source | GNU/Hurd News

Via | Reddit

Here is what he has to say about his work so far:

- we can manage chrome extensions (I just copied examples from here): we can recognize unpacked extensions, install, enable/disable. (oops.. uninstall/delete missing. Adding next days..)
- we can interpret (a bit) the version 2 manifest.json inside
- we can manage browse actions
- we can manage page actions
- we can open popups

So, the first easy step is done. Now what to really say we are supporting chrome extensions? Here is my todo list:
- support chrome object and (a subset of) its API (very long task)
- support the callback mechanism (really hard, this is the trick missing to say we’ll reach one day our goal)
- implement a way to retrieve extensions (support chrome extensions site? seems problematic. Add a ghns layer? Should do the trick. Probably…)
- ehm… port/implement extensions

Boon or bust?

It’s unclear to us how many KDE users prefer ReKonq over Firefox or Chrome but I would assume that it’s not an army.  That said, ReKonq does have a very compelling ‘web-app’ creation tool that supplements Firefox & Chrome quite nicely!  Tools like Google Keep work great in ReKonq as a stand-a-lone web app that iconifies to your taskbar.  At the same time, users of tools like Feedly –the ultra-popular Google Reader replacement– can’t take advantage of ReKonq powerful web app wrapper because it requires an extension to be installed in either Firefox or Chrome.  Feedly even leaves Internet Explorer users out in the cold with their model!

Source | Adjam