05.17.09

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Linux Poem Contest–Write and Win $5

  General:Write a minimum of 4 lines about Linux (could be distro specific like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, etc.)…maximum length in not there. The lines should be rhyming though might not follow a meter system. No need to mention but still: absolutely original lines should be submitted.

• Security – It’s Not Just For Geeks

  One of the most recent articles is about an incident with a major botnet. Apparently, the creators of the botnet decided to hit the “big red button” which brought roughly 100,000 Windows machines to their knees in bluescreen madness.

• Server

  • Positron Releases Asterisk Based Embedded PBX PCI Adapter

    Positron Telecommunication Systems Inc. announced today that it has released the V-114 PCI adapter, the first commercially available embedded PBX PCI adapter based on the open source Linux Project, Asterisk®. The V-114 offers a standalone solution that integrates Linux, Asterisk and Telephony ports all on a single PCI adapter that installs simply and easily into any operating system as an Ethernet adapter.

  • Landscape 1.3 released for Ubuntu management

    Landscape is a commercial service for helping enterprises to scale and manage multiple Ubuntu deployments on both servers and desktops. The new release includes features for managing Ubuntu in Amazon EC2 cloud based deployments which is something that prior versions Landscape did not manage. The Amazon EC2 support makes a whole lot of sense now since with the recent Jaunty Ubuntu release, Ubuntu has cloud capabilities and can be easily run as an Amazon EC2 instance.

• Kernel Space

  • GlusterFS 2.0 Release: msg#06316

    Greetings everyone!

    GlusterFS is a clustered file system that runs on commodity off-the-shelf hardware, delivering multiple times the scalability and performance of conventional storage. The architecture is modular, stackable and kernel-independent, which makes it easy to customize, install, manage and support different operating systems. Multiple storage systems can be clustered together, supporting petabytes of capacity in a single global namespace. Building a configuration of a few hundred terabytes can be accomplished in less than thirty minutes.

  • DisplayLink Releases Linux Source Code for Its USB Graphics Processors

    Today DisplayLink is taking steps to bring its USB display technology, formerly only available on Windows and Mac, to Linux. DisplayLink’s chips enable one or more high resolution displays to be connected via the standard, universal USB 2.0 connector. The library released today enables the creation of Linux software – X Servers, drivers, and other applications – which will work with the growing universe of products using DisplayLink technology.

• Graphics

  • OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 State Trackers For Gallium3D

    Just minutes after announcing Mesa 7.5 Release Candidate 2, Brian Paul has announced that he is in the process of pushing out Gallium3D state trackers for OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0. These two new state trackers for this forthcoming Linux graphics architecture are coming just two weeks after an OpenVG state tracker was released for accelerating this other Khronos API.

  • The Linux VGA Arbiter Has Been Revived

    Tiago Vignatti has announced he has revived work on the VGA Arbiter for Linux and will be attempting to push this code upstream in the Linux kernel, just four years after this arbitration code was first hashed out.

  • Beryl back from the ashes

    You might be interested that over a weekend a mate and myself introduced Beryl back in to the fold. This is a direct result of our frustration of how bloated Compiz has become and is becoming more of a fashion thing rather than functional for having multiple desktops.

• Applications

  • aTunes: Amazing Cross-Platform Audio Player and Manager

    aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems.

  • LGP History pt 1: How LGP came to be

    Back in the day, 1999, around august time to be exact, I was working for a fairly horrible company in London. I had been a beta tester on Loki’s Civilisation: Call to Power, but I couldn’t easily buy a copy from anywhere in the UK. Finally, a friend and I ordered it from the states. We waited weeks for the delivery, and finally a month or so after ordering, it arrived.

• Distributions

  • BackTrack 4 – Hacking galore

    BackTrack is a powerful hacking suite. It is well made, with stylish touches that add to the overall feel of the distribution. It runs very fast in the live mode, even faster than most installed distributions. Most importantly, the array of tool is rich, well balanced and overall quite impressive.

    The Beta version did throw a few errors here and there, but it was nothing major. Small consistency issues also arise, and there’s the lack of support for Ext4, which I expect will be solved soon. Documentation needs to be improved, starting with the website SSL certificate and continuing with lots of questions regarding the general usage.

  • Ubuntu

    • Xubuntu: A Simple Approach To Ubuntu

      For the new Linux user, Xubuntu is an easy to use version of Ubuntu that is fast, simple, and reliable. Experienced or “get it done” types will appreciate the minimalist approach, that can be beefed up to whatever degree that is needed.

    • Ubuntu 9.10 Off To A Great Performance Start

      Wow, while there may not be many end-user improvements in Ubuntu 9.10 yet and the desktop looks just like that of Ubuntu 9.04, there does seem to be some performance improvements. Besides the huge SQLite improvement that did not come as a surprise, there are better compilation times with GCC 4.4, much better disk performance with the newer Linux kernel, and other improvements throughout. One area that still needs to be improved upon is with the Intel Linux graphics performance after going through radical changes with kernel mode-setting, DRI2, and the Graphics Execution Manager.

    • Linux vs Windows: The Netbook Question

      I recommend you try Linux on your current PC before making your decision. Ubuntu Linux is one popular distribution that’s extremely easy to set up and get running. You can boot it directly from the CD (which you burn from a downloaded .iso file), install it from inside Windows, or put it onto a bootable flash drive.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Motorola gets $310 million China Mobile deal

    MOBILE HARDWARE MAKER Motorola has won a deal worth $310 million to provide gear to China Mobile Communications.

  • Linux development service cracks DaVinci code

    Timesys announced its first LinuxLink development subscription support for the Texas Instruments (TI) DaVinci architecture. The LinuxLink framework now supports TI’s video-oriented DM6446 and DM355 RISC/DSP system-on-chips (SoCs), and provides Linux-based reference board device drivers and automated development tools, says the company.

  • GP2X Wiz Now Available

    That’s right mobile gaming fanatics. GamePark’s new GP2X Wiz portable game system is now available. The new device sports a 533Mhz 3D accelerator plus flash engine, 1 gigabyte flash memory, SD card support, and will run you about $180.

    The Wiz is also built on the king of open-source OSs Linux, which, alongside the Wiz SDK, means users can create their own games.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • Netbook boasts Linux multi-track recording suite

      Trinity Audio Group announced a netbook version of its Linux-based multi-track recording product. The Indamixx Netbook Model 2 is an Intel Atom-based MSI Wind, with a 10-inch screen, 3G, and a 160GB hard drive, pre-installed with Trinity Audio’s digital mixing and editing suite.

      [...]

      The preloaded Linux software mix still appears to be based largely on 64Studio, a community project that maintains a Linux distribution for creative content professionals, such as A/V producers and recording engineers. However, Trinity Audio has now ported its suite to a “Transmission 3.0″ distribution based on Ubuntu Linux 9.04, says the company.

    • Dell baffles buyers with new netbook

      Dell has announced a ‘new’ netbook, the Inspiron Mini10v, an eerily similar model to the company’s previous offering, the plain Mini 10. The obvious difference is price, which drops to £200 in the cheapest Ubuntu Linux version.

      The price reduction has been achieved by stripping out the odd feature that most netbook buyers would hardly have used, specifically the HDMI interface, and by using a different graphics chipset, the plain Intel GMA 500 rather than the equally basic Intel GMA 945GSE.

Free Software/Open Source

• Blackboard Swallows Its Competitors, Tossing Open Alternatives a Bone

  It’s an interesting situation playing out in the academic software market that other software vendors would do well to watch. By swallowing its competition, Blackboard is keeping its hold on the marketshare and presumably positioning itself for the future. But simply buying competitors to keep hold of the market, and not making changes to retain the customers that opted for their products over yours in the first place isn’t sustainable. There are alternatives — there are always alternatives. In its drive to purchase, not revise, Blackboard has tossed its open source competitors a great opportunity.

• Sun

  • Sun shines more light on Open Source Kernels

    Sun Microsystems will hold its first-ever kernel conference in Australia later this year. Perfect timing, says a company spokesperson, as more and more companies turn to Open Source to remain innovative in harder economic times.

  • What was done in OOo 3.1?

    Last week on 7 th of May OpenOffice.org 3.1 was released and more than 2 million users downloaded that version until now. OOo 3.1 is the first feature release after the successful OOo 3.0 release 7 months ago. What was done in that version. Here you can find the numbers beside the features described in the “ what’s new guide”.

  • Chart performance

    Recently I did some performance measurements on charts. I used a big line chart with 13 series each with 4000 data points.

• FSF/GNU

  • Gnash Summer Project Seeks Donations

    The Gnash free flash player development team is setting its sights on getting to version 9.0 by the end of the summer and is launching a project later this month to ensure that they meet their goal. The project, known as the “Gnash V9 Summer Bash” will engage student interns to hammer through a number of ActionScript3 (AS3) Class Libraries that are critical to v9 and v10 functionality. The success of the project will result in Gnash compatibility with a number of high-demand websites — including educational, major media, and other popular sites.

• Programming

  • Grails and Scala support Google’s AppEngine

    There is a lot of demand for making Google’s App Engine web application hosting platform accessible to more programming languages and frameworks. Originally launched supporting only the Python language, Google recently announced that App Engine would also support Java programs. Now, developers are adding support for that platform to their JVM based languages and frameworks. The developers of the Grails web framework have announced that the framework’s latest version 1.1.1 officially supports the hosting platform. It has also been reported that the Scala programming language cooperates with the AppEngine. Scala – a pragmatic combination of functional and object-oriented programming approaches – uses the Google Eclipse plug-in for this purpose.

Leftovers

• Tune Hunter sues the big names in music

  AN OUTFIT called Tune Hunter has accused a raft of companies including music-search service Shazam plus Apple, Amazon, Napster, Samsung, Motorola, Gracenote, Verizon Wireless, LG Electronics, AT&T Mobility, and Pantech Wireless of nicking its idea for a music identification system.

• New Danger Mouse CD Released As A Blank CD-R Due To Legal Fight With EMI

  Of course, one of the main reasons why the album became so well known was because EMI sent cease-and-desist letters to everyone who posted copies of the album, and then to anyone who posted that they were going to participate in the “Grey Tuesday” protest. The whole thing seemed pretty silly. It’s not as if anyone listening to The Grey Album would find it a substitute for either of the other albums.