07.19.09

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Linux Sucks

  Please stay away from GNU/Linux because it is a computer revolution. It is slowly changing the computer industry in major ways. Even Google is creating their own operating system that will be based on the Linux kernel. What are they thinking? Linux for the masses? Oh no! How are we going to get used to not paying hundreds of dollars for an OS. We would have to change our way of thinking and I don’t think majority people are ready for that. We cannot allow this to happen. I have been using GNU/Linux for years and I still can’t get used to such a great operating system. I am happy with it and the great software that I am using. Please take my warning seriously! GNU/Linux is awful and I hope you stay away from it. It is better to pay high prices for an OS that you do not like and the company will dictate to you what you can or cannot do with it, what software you can install and treat you like a criminal. If you do not take my warning seriously and will install GNU/Linux I hope that you are ready for what is to follow. Don’t say I haven’t warned you. Think hard about switching to GNU/Linux.

• Chrome OS to Bring More Linux IT Jobs?

  The news has been abuzz about Google’s upcoming OS. Many people have been arguing reasons for and against the system, its viability in such a market, and, if the OS is successful, even the morality of the company who may be trusted with even more private information than it already has. Well, here’s another reason for Chrome OS: it could bring more jobs in the area of Linux IT.

• Kernel Space

  • Does Printing Work Well In Linux?

    So does printing work well in Linux? My response would be an enthusiastic “YES”.

  • Mesa 7.5 Finally Released w/ New Features

    After being in development for a number of months and being challenged by a few delays, Mesa 7.5 was officially released last night. What’s most significant about this milestone is that it’s the first release to include the Gallium3D architecture. The Gallium3D drivers are still incomplete and there are many state trackers to be added, but this code for the next-generation Linux graphics card drivers is now living in mainline Mesa.

• Applications

  • Open Source Word Processors Give You Lots of Free Choices, Part 1

    With interest heating up around Linux on netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs, more and more people are hunting for good word processing software that runs on Linux. Luckily, while a lot of word processing options for Linux have fallen by the wayside, new ones keep springing up, too. Meanwhile, some of the older standbys are picking up features that rival those of Microsoft Word.

  • 7 Excellent Open Courseware Collections for Digital Photographers

    Digital photographers are always looking to improve their skills behind the lens. Anyone can point and click, but what does it take to take a picture with real depth, meaning, and intrigue? What does it take to move from taking a vacation photo to capturing a moment in time? The following open courseware collections aim to help students move from just playing around with a digital camera to creating works of art.

  • The Wine development release 1.1.26 is now available.

    What’s new in this release (see below for details):
    – Still more translation updates.
    – Faster bitmap stretching using XRender.
    – Proxy support in WinHTTP.
    – Many more JScript functions.
    – Various bug fixes.

  • Quod Libet – A Different GTK Music Player

    Quod Libet is a GTK music player written in Python with support for various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, MP4 and WMA. Quod Libet has a different interface and a slightly different approach compared to players like Rhythmbox or Banshee, for example.

  • Review: Rhythmbox 0.12.0 in Ubuntu 9.04

    Rhythmbox is the default audio player coming with the GNOME desktop environment, featuring a clean, typical interface which is so common for GTK audio players. I could say that Rhythmbox has little missing features and it is rather complete.

  • Gargoyle: Web Interface for Router Configuration

    Gargoyle is a router interface for devices of the Linksys WRT54G series and other small routers such as the La Fonera. The software is based on the recently released OpenWrt firmware Kamikaze and targets not only power users but speaks especially to the average user as well. It provides functions not usually found in router firmware, such as smart DynDNS support, QoS and used bandwidth monitoring.

• Desktop Environments

  • An open alternative for Palm Pre iTunes users

    He continued, “We promise not to change our application to prevent users to use Amarok with your device. Not only do we care about our users, we are not a competitor to you or have any ulterior motives. Amarok is already fully supported on all flavors of Linux and we have beta releases on Windows and Mac OSX which just need a bit of polishing and stabilization.”

    Much as I like iTunes, you have to admit, especially if you’re Palm or any other phone or hand-held device maker, that the Amarok offer should be taken seriously. After all, you’re in the business of selling full-featured devices, not playing software catch-up. Wouldn’t you rather have an open platform that would just work for your customers without worries? I know I would.

• Distributions

  • Wolvix-2.0.0beta2

    This distro was brought to my attention in the BN IRC room, and whilst my distro hopping machine had difficulties with it (its a little anti social at the moment) I gave it a run on one of the many machines dotted around my house and found myself very surprised (pleasantly) by the results. Its a Slackware based distro, and in these days of MONO uncertainty and the ever growing popularity of about 4 or 5 of the “big name” distro’s, its nice to break out of the mold and take a look at a lesser known option (sans MONO I hasten to add).

  • Vector Linux 6.0 Gold – Review and Screenshots

    Vector Linux is a popular Linux Distro whose motto is “speed, performance, stability”.

    Version 6.0 was released in February 2009. Their stated goal is to “Keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide.” Having said that, this end user decided to see what was cooking at Vector.

  • Red Hat

    • CIT Group falls off S&P 500 index

    • Red Hat replaces CIT in S&P 500 index

      The switch will occur July 24 after the market closes. S&P says CIT’s value had fallen too low Friday for the bank to remain a member of the S&P 500.

    • Red Hat joins the S&P 500

      Standard and Poor’s announced that Red Hat would join the S&P 500 as of the close of trading on Friday. Red Hat replaces lender CIT Group, which had a market capitalization below $275 million, ranking it 500th in the index.

      The market seemed to like the S&P news. In after hours trading Friday, Red Hat was up 8.45 percent to $22.34.

  • Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Christian Edition 5.0 Is Based on Ubuntu 9.04

      The Ubuntu CE development team proudly announced yesterday, July 17th, the immediate availability of the Ubuntu Christian Edition 5.0. Being based on the powerful Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04), the new, highly anticipated release of Ubuntu Christian Edition includes a brand new DansGuardian GUI, E-sword installer and, of course, the usual updates and fixes.

    • Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS Released

      For those of you still running Ubuntu 8.04 due to its Long-Term Support status rather than upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 or Ubuntu 9.04, fire up your update manager as Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS is now available. Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS is the third maintenance update targeting the Hardy Heron and it includes security updates and fixes for high impact bugs.

• Devices/Embedded

  • MontaVista Launches Android Commercialization Services Offering

    MontaVista® Software, Inc., the leader in embedded Linux® commercialization, today launched a professional services offering for design engineers developing commercial products with Google Android™. MontaVista’s Android Commercialization Services offering is designed to help Android developers deliver innovative commercial products to market quickly and efficiently. This new global services offering is being launched this week with a series of seminars in Tokyo, Taipei, and Seoul.

  • Phones

    • Palm’s Mojo Risin’

      Palm issued a public release of the Mojo software development kit for its new webOS operating system, in what could possibly be a response to leaks of the SDK in June. The SDK, given a limited release in April, had been slated for public release by the end of summer. Palm’s take is that the public release follows the success of its early access program. “After a successful early access program, Palm’s Mojo Software Development Kit is available to all interested app developers,” begins the announcement on Palm’s blog by Online Communications Director Jon Zilber.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • Group test: Linux netbooks

      Netbooks may be on the cheaper side of computing, but as we’re all watching our pennies now, making the right choice is essential. We’ve brought together all the netbooks we could get hold of – most of which are bundled with Linux – for a comprehensive test.

    • HyperSpace and Mobiln Enter Partnership to Conquer Netbooks, Nettops, MIDs, and Google Chrome OS?

      Google’s recently announced Linux-based, cloud operating system, Chrome OS, has been the talk of the tech world over the last few days, and rightfully so. Any talk of a fresh OS designed for netbooks (at least, initially) is sure to grab headlines, but when you sex it up by tossing the Big G into the mix, well, it’s world-class news.

    • Microsoft to exclude ARM netbooks for Windows 7

      Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system will not run on netbooks powered by ARM chips, Microsoft said on Wednesday…

    • Checking out the Jolicloud Netbook OS

      That may, actually, be exactly what is needed to bring the concepts of Ubuntu Netbook Remix to the masses. It’s too early to tell, but Jolicloud looks like it has a chance of being one of the first Linux-based netbook distros to take off, if they can get deals with hardware manufacturers.

Free Software/Open Source

• OSGeo Journal – Volume 5 – OSGeo 2008 Annual Report

  All articles are copyrighted by the respective authors and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Contact the author directly for questions about modifying or revising an article.

• How NPR is Embracing Open Source and Open APIs

  News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Here’s a preview of what he’ll be talking about.

• Evolutionary Computing — my open-source journey (and maybe yours, too)

  As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

• Free ‘Really Cool’ Stickers About Linux/FOSS

  Do you want to remove that Windows or Apple logo from your Linux-powered netbook or laptop? If you do then you may as well replace it with some cool graphics that would stand out. To spare you from the hassles of creating you own or searching the web, I recommend that you download the Free Software Sticker Book first. There you will find tons of ready-made stickers (in ODG format) that is related to Linux and Free and Open Source software. But before I’ll give you the download link, here are some teasers…

• NICTA opens its software to the world

  Research organisation National ICT Australia (NICTA) has stepped up its support for open source software by launching the OpenNICTA portal (http://www.opennicta.com) where people can view and download software developed and licensed by the organisation.

• Five Open Source Apps For Writers and Authors

  Even if you have the perfect idea for the next Great American Novel, getting it down on paper is never easy. While you could always use standard word processors like OpenOffice Write or AbiWord, they don’t have the bells and whistles that make writing books, manuals, and theses as easy as possible. Fortunately, there are a few open source applications that help budding authors get stories out of their heads and into the hands of readers.

• Firefox

  • Now You Too Can Contribute to Firefox…

    Quite: this isn’t just about getting some well-deserved dosh to the coders, but also about giving users a way to feel more engaged. Great move.

  • Celebrate 1 billion Firefox downloads

    Some time in August Firefox will be downloaded for the billionth time (or one thousand millionth) since its original release, back in November 2004.

• Business

  • Q&A: Open Database

    Dr. Dobb’s: What’s MariaDB?

    Widenius: It’s a community developed branch of MySQL with bug fixes and new features developed by the MariaDB community, of which Monty Program Ab is an active member. We will keep MariaDB in sync with MySQL development to ensure all bug fixes and features in MySQL also exists in MariaDB. At this time MariaDB 5.1 should be notable faster, have more features and have fewer bugs than the corresponding MySQL 5.1 release.

• Openness

  • (Open) Learning from Open Source

    As regular readers of this blog will know, I am intrigued by the way that ideas from free software are moving across to different disciplines. Of course, applying them is no simple matter: there may not be an obvious one-to-one mapping of the act of coding to activities in the new domain, or there may be significant cultural differences that place obstacles in the way of sharing.

  • Douglas Rushkoff’s Open Source Economy: A ReadWriteWeb Interview

    As a media theorist who’s written about some of the most influential ideas of the digital age, Rushkoff is second to none. In Life Inc., he describes not just corporations, but how we all can change to an “open source economy” that favors decentralized value creation over banking and central currency. We spoke with him to ask more about what this new economy would look like and how the Web is involved.

  • Results of EC questionnaire on OA

    CREST has released the results of its questionnaire on OA. The questionnaire responses were due April 1, 2009, and the EC accepted the summary of responses on June 9, 2009. (Thanks to Heinz Pampel.)

Leftovers

• Censorship/Web Abuse

  • The NSA wiretapping story nobody wanted

    Mark Klein: Fear. First of all it was a scary time. It still is a scary time, but during the Bush years it was sort of a witch hunt atmosphere and people were afraid. People are afraid of losing their jobs, and it’s a rule of thumb that if you become a whistleblower you’ll probably lose your job. And if you have a security clearance, you not only lose your job, but you probably will be prosecuted by the government. The Bush administration made that very clear in statements they made over and over again: ‘Anybody who reveals anything about our secret programs will be prosecuted and we are running investigations to find out who leaked this to the New York Times.’ Well that puts a fear in people.

  • Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

    But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

  • Amazon vanishes 1984 from citizen Kindles

    In an irony-filled moment that underlines the flaws of our increasingly digital society, Amazon has removed George Orwell’s 1984 from America’s Kindle ebook readers.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Associated Press: “It’s Okay If WE Do It.”

    This could have been an enthusiastic Wikipedia editor, so I checked the history page of the article, which tracks every change. It turns out that Wikipedia had it first. Here is a link to the 10 July 2009 version of the article.

    Let me repeat, to be clear: Wikipedia Had It First. Which means an AP writer or editor cribbed directly from Wikipedia, changed some words, and put it in the article.

    In and of itself, that is not the problem. Wikipedia is, in fact, fine with this.

  • Gadzooks – it’s ZookZ from Antigua

    I’ve been following the rather entertaining case of Antigua vs. US for a few years now. Basically, the US government has taken a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude to the WTO – refusing to follow the latter’s rules while seeking to enforce them against others. The net result is that plucky little Antigua seems to have won some kind of permission to ignore US copyright – up to a certain point – although nobody really knows what this means in practice.

  • ‘Drop Internet Issues From ACTA, Add Public Interest’

    Nine organisations representing the technology industry, libraries, digital rights and privacy interests have sent a letter to United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk urging that issues related to the internet be dropped from negotiations for an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). They also demanded that in the secretive ACTA negotiation, negotiating documents be made available to those representing the public interest, and that advisory committees be created to include civil society and internet-related industry interests.