Before we get rolling on the last FOSS Force item before the weekend, I’d like to welcome Hunter Banks to the FOSS Force team. Hunter is part of the FOSS-forward Banks family of Los Angeles — dad Phillip is a computer consultant and a long-time Southern California Linux Expo volunteer (along with brother Phillip Jr.), and sister Keila has been in both the FOSS and mainstream media on girls-in-tech issues — and he’s writing a Linux/FOSS gaming column.
In case you weren’t paying attention, there’s a new Linux file system on the horizon, thanks to a former Google engineer.
That engineer in question, namely Kent Overstreet, posted a message on LKML.org last week promoting the progress of Bcache File System, or Bcachefs, the first Linux file system written specifically for solid state disks. The purpose of the new file system is to ramp up the speed in the way Linux stores data on servers.
“Yet another new filesystem? Why?” Overstreet asks in his post. And then he adeptly answers the age-old question.
“Well, years ago (going back to when I was still at Google), I and the other people working on bcache realized that what we were working on was, almost by accident, a good chunk of the functionality of a full blown filesystem — and there was a really clean and elegant design to be had there if we took it and ran with it,” Overstreet wrote. “And a fast one — the main goal of bcachefs to match ext4 and xfs on performance and reliability, but with the features of btrfs/zfs.”
First things first: When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town down around San Antone, it’ll mark the start of Texas Linux Fest, the sixth annual two-day Linux/FOSS hoedown deep in the heart of the Lone Star State, this year about halfway between Austin and San Antonio. Lots of great speakers with lots of great sponsors give this show a more local feel than the one earlier this week in the Pacific Northwest, so if you’re in the neighborhood, you should give the fest a visit.
While the rest of FOSS Nation oooohs and ahhhhs with all the developments currently coming out of LinuxCon in Seattle, the end of the week’s attention — and attendance — shifts to San Marcos, Texas.
San Marcos is an exciting, historic community in the heart of Central Texas midway between Austin and San Antonio. It is home to Texas State University (the alma mater of Lyndon Johnson), and — as the Chamber of Commerce likes to boast — home of the famous San Marcos outlet malls, the largest in the Southwest.
This year, San Marcos is home to Texas Linux Fest 2015, which is being held Friday and Saturday of this week at the San Marcos Conference Center.
It’s been a busy week on the Isle of Man, and elsewhere, so let’s not tarry and dive in, shall we?
Canonical Opens Ubuntu One: After dropping its Ubuntu One cloud storage service a year ago, Ars Techinca reports Canonical this week released the system’s file-syncing code under the Affero General Public License Version 3.
“The code we’re releasing is the server side of what desktop clients connected to when syncing local or remote changes,” said Martin Albisetti, Canonical’s Director of Online Services, in a post on the Ubuntu site. “This is code where most of the innovation and hard work went throughout the years, where we faced most of the scaling challenges and the basis on which other components were built upon.”
Last October, FOSS Force published a story on the 2012 imprisonment — without charges — by the Syrian government of Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Syrian computer engineer specializing in open source software development. Bassel has become known worldwide for his strong commitment to the open source paradigm, teaching others about technology, and contributing his experience freely to help the world.
Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil has been under arrest in Syria since March 2012. (Photo: Joi Ito, CC-BY-2.0)Earlier this year and up to a fortnight ago, the Syrian government has been systematically releasing hundreds of prisoners. However, so far Bassel hasn’t been one of them.
Jon Phillips, a digital activist living in the U.S. who has collaborated with Bassel on projects in the past and is currently working to help free Bassel, took a few minutes with FOSS Force to update Bassel’s plight.
While both bending the language and changing definitions of hardware on the fly, Lenovo announced on Tuesday the Lenovo ThinkPad P50 and P70, the new ThinkPad hardware to be available in Q4.
But first, let’s set things straight: The ThinkPad is no longer a laptop, according to the Lenovo press release. The first paragraph of the press release says the company “unveiled the beginning of a new family of mobile workstation innovations.” So I guess that’s what we’re calling them now – mobile workstations.
The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 should be out later this year.Fine.
Anyway, the new ThinkPad P70 comes with the most memory and storage ever found in a laptop…sorry, a mobile workstation. Namely, maxing out at 64GB of DDR4 ECC memory and with the ability to handle up to four storage devices and up to a terabyte of SSD storage. It also utilizes the latest PCIe technology for speeds up to five times faster than current SATA technology. But wait, there’s more: The ThinkPad P70 “comes with two Intel ThunderboltTM 3 ports for ultra-fast connectivity and a 4K UHD display or optional FHD touch,” according to the release.
LibreOffice 5 Ready for Prime Time: LibreOffice, the office suite of choice of yours truly and others in the FOSS field, is now in the starting blocks to take on the proprietary office suites. The Document Foundation announced this week the release of LibreOffice 5.0, with a significantly improved user interface, with a better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, the latest LO release offers better interoperability with proprietary office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple iWork, with new and improved filters to handle non standard formats.
“In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the office suite we were envisioning for the long term,” said Michael Meeks, a director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of user interface.”
With an announcement on the Linux Weekly News site on Tuesday, the Ada Initiative will be tying up the loose ends and wrapping up their work in October.
“It is with mixed feelings that we announce that the Ada Initiative will be shutting down in approximately mid-October,” the statement said. “We are proud of what we accomplished with the support of many thousands of volunteers, sponsors, and donors, and we expect all of our programs to continue on in some form without the Ada Initiative. Thank you for your incredible work and support!”
The Ally Workshop is one of the many positive programs the Ada Initiative brought to the tech field. Though the Ada Initiative is closing up shop in October, the programs will be available for others to continue.According to the statement, after a search for a new executive director late last year, the new hire didn’t work out.
The statement explains: “That brought us to a decision point. It would have been unreasonable to expect Valerie (Aurora, a co-founder) and Mary (Gardiner, a co-founder) to continue with the Ada Initiative forever. We considered running a second ED search, but it had become clear to the board that the success of the Ada Initiative was very much a product of its two founders, and was a direct result of their experiences, skills, strengths and passions. We felt the likelihood of finding a new ED who could effectively fit into Valerie’s shoes was low. We also considered several other options for continuing the organization, including changing its programs, or becoming volunteer-only.”
It’s been pretty warm where I live on the Central California coast, and I hope everyone else has been keeping cool — or as cool as possible — this week. After OSCON, there’s been sort of a lull in news that’s uniquely FOSS-related, but we do have a couple of tidbits to throw you as we end the week.
Keila Banks, fresh off her OSCON keynote, appears Saturday on MSNBC (Photo: OSCON video)All in the Family: It seems that the Banks family of Los Angeles has taken upon itself to single-handedly invite the wider world to the see and try out the benefits of FOSS and programming. We reported on Keila Banks speaking at OSCON last week, but so has Business Insider and MTV News — and now MSNBC is getting in on the act by having her on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show at 8 a.m. Saturday. Check your local listings.
While FOSS Force gave you a look at setting up KDE Plasma on the desktop in Don Parris’ article last week, KDE recently jumped into the mobile fray by announcing KDE Plasma Mobile at their Akademy conference this week in Spain.
While it joins an already crowded field, with the likes of Android, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and others already in the mobile OS space, Plasma Mobile “offers a free — as in freedom and beer — user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices,” wrote Sebastian Kugler, a lead architect, on KDE’s website. “Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.”