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Links 10/09/2009: RHEL 6 Videos, More Linux Phones



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Nominations Open for 2009 Linux Medical News Freedom Award
    Nominations are officially open for the 9th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 14th-18th AMIA Fall conference in San Francisco, CA. Deadline for entries is September 30th, 2009. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group.


  • NEC Electronics and Wind River Expand Collaboration on Linux Solutions for Portable Audio/Visual Devices Market
    NEC Electronics Corporation (TOKYO: 6723), the leading provider of semiconductor solutions, and Wind River, the global leader in Device Software Optimization (DSO), today announced an expanded collaboration to jointly develop Linux solutions for the market of portable devices, such as multimedia players and mobile televisions. As the first jointly developed solution, NEC Electronics today introduced a new software development kit (SDK) based on Wind River Linux technology for the company`s EMMA Mobile 1, an optimal system LSI chip for the market of portable devices to process audio and visual (A/V) data. Additional SDKs for EMMA series products based on Wind River Linux technology targeting digital multimedia consumer devices are expected to follow in late 2009 and in 2010.


  • No Linux on PS3 Revisited
    So will the Other OS will return? Maybe. Sony recently unveiled the Academic PS3 Dev Kit. Could this lead to the return of the Other OS on a one to one basis? It’s certainly possible that drivers could be written for the change in hardware and then submitted to Sony. If feedback is strong enough they could allow the needed change to the hypervisor code. Time will tell…


  • ubuntu and my friend


  • New At Linux




  • Weekly

    • Linux Outlaws 110 - The Chinless Hero
      This week on Linux Outlaws: Whiskey, Chrome, a Frankencamera, pros & cons of The Cloud, Windows release parties, Jolicloud, Super Outlaw Bros., a Weather Widget and much more…


    • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 61
      The following Linux distributions have been announced last week: Lubuntu 9.10 Beta 14, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 5, Tiny Core Linux 2.3, Zenwalk 6.2 and Frugalware 1.1. In other news: the KDE Community announced the first maintenance release of the KDE 4.3 desktop environment. An in-depth review of the Gnote 0.6.2 application is also present in this edition. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated last week and the development releases.






  • Desktop

    • How to set up Ubuntu Linux on a Mac -- it's easy and free
      Why would you want to run Linux on a Mac? There are probably a few good reasons -- learning about a different OS, using software that's not available on the Mac platform, or for a Linux class in school. While you can create a bootable partition on your Mac and boot Linux from it, I prefer to do things the lazy way. In this short how-to post, I'll demonstrate how I installed Ubuntu Linux 9.04, also known as "Jaunty Jackalope."


    • In Short
      All public Athena clusters except the one in 4-167 were updated to Debathena during the summer, according to Student Information Processing Board member Geoffrey G. Thomas ’10. Debathena allows Ubuntu users to install the same versions on software on their Athena accounts as on their personal computers, and will allow Athena software to stay up to date with their latest Ubuntu versions, said Thomas. Dorm clusters are in the process of being updated, he said.








  • Server

    • The house that twitters
      Around two dozen wireless sensors monitor temperature, electricity and water usage and transmit the information to a central Linux server. The server makes intelligent decisions based on this information to manage devices around the house.


    • Aussie financial firms dump Unix, Windows for Linux on the mainframe
      At the recent Red Hat Summit in Chicago, Red Hat Senior Solutions Architect Andrew Hardy trotted out three case studies, in which customers from the finance sector consolidated multiple Unix- and Windows-based systems onto Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on the IBM System Z mainframe.






  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 2.6.31
      Ok, there's just a few final commits since -rc9 to fix a couple of last regressions and problems, and now the final 2.6.31 is out there. The small diffstat and shortlog is below, the full log and diff from 2.6.30 are being uploaded to kernel.org (and then mirrored out) as I write this. In general, the full set of 2.6.30->31 changes are too numerous to list, but as usual, you'll find some high-level overviews on kernelnewbies.org.


    • Linux Kernel 2.6.31 released
      As announced on the LKML mailing list at just past 11pm yesterday, Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.31.


    • New, Updated Drivers Coming To Linux 2.6.32
      Over three dozen Linux staging drivers are mentioned, but there's a few interesting comments in particular. For instance, Google's Android drivers may end up being dropped from the staging tree within the Linux 2.6.32 cycle. While Android uses Linux and Google is quite friendly with Linux and different open-source projects, the developers working on the upstream Android drivers aren't caring whether or not this code enters the mainline kernel. Instead these developers are just concerning themselves with running the drivers on the Linux 2.6.29 kernel they currently are using. If this continues to occur, the Android drivers will disappear from the staging tree. In a similar situation, Microsoft's Hyper-V drivers may end up getting dropped in the Linux 2.6.33 release.


    • The Next Round
      The latest version of Linux offers a whole host of new features – for example a USB 3.0 infrastructure, drivers for the Sound Blaster X-Fi, KMS support for Radeon chips and improved versions of Btrfs and Ext4. As is traditional with new Linux versions in the main development branch, however, this is only the tip of the iceberg.


    • Warm Up Your Voting Fingers and Choose Your Favorite FakeLinusTorvalds
      If you've been paying attention on Twitter and Identi.ca, lately then you've no doubt had a few laughs over the hilarious and sometimes slightly (okay, really) offbeat status updates from FakeLinusTorvalds. As Kristin wrote recently, four different people have gone incognito to impersonate the real Linus Torvalds -- with his blessing, of course -- to poke some good natured fun at one of the community's most respected people.


    • Kudos To Peter Hutterer With X.Org 7.5
      X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 will be arriving months late once it's released after failing to meet the original April release schedule and then failed twice with two more proposed releases during the summer. However, the latest release schedule, which puts the final release in late September or so, might actually work out this time -- in good part thanks to Peter Hutterer.


    • New Open-Source ATI Driver Bug-Fix Release
      The xf86-video-ati 6.12.3 driver release announcement can be read on the X.Org mailing list.






  • Applications

    • Google begins launch of Chrome Extensions
      A message on the Chromium Blog indicates that Google are beginning the process of rolling out extensions for Google Chrome. Although Chrome and Chromium are regarded as good browsers, critics have pointed to the lack of Firefox style Add-ons as a reason for it not being adopted more widely. Google have been working on implementing extensions and have now moved to turn on the extensions system in the Dev channel builds of Chrome and Chromium.


    • Four GNOME Blogging Clients Worth Noting
      As part of our continuing series this week on open source blogging tools, today we're going to take a look at clients created specifically for the GNOME desktop. If you prefer KDE, then check out yesterday's post in the series.


    • Building Linux Audio Applications 101: A User's Guide, Part 2
      In this article I finish the process we started in the last episode. Read on for the thrilling denouement.








  • Distributions



    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Summit - videos, presentations and outlook for RHEL6
        Videos, some keynote speeches and talks and PDFs of many of the presentations given at the Red Hat Summit 2009 and JBoss World Chicago 2009 conferences, held in parallel last week, are now available from the conference websites.


      • Red Hat releases Satellite 5.3 with Cobbler engine
        Red Hat open sourced the code for Satellite a year ago to broaden involvement and innovation, and this is the first version created from the ground up as a community-generated, open source product, said Michael deHaan, a Red Hat senior software engineer and leader of the Cobbler project.


      • Survey: VMware, Red Hat to claim more IT dollars
        With the recent acquisition of open-source vendor SpringSource, VMware can deliver on the powerful "Build-Deploy-Manage" mantra that SpringSource championed to its 2 million developers.


      • Red Hat Challenges Ubuntu With KVM Support
        The one certainty is that KVM, and by extension all Linux distributions that support it, will benefit from Red Hat’s integration, while the showdown between Ubuntu server edition and RHEL intensifies.








    • Debian Family

      • Ubuntu's Koala food arrives on shelves
        Eucalyptus Systems - the fledgling open source outfit that mimics Amazon's so-called compute cloud inside private data centers - has announced its first commercial product.

        Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE) is based on the open-source Eucalyptus "private cloud" platform originally developed by company co-founder and chief technology officer Rich Wolski and his fellow researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara.


      • Canonical’s Ubuntu Cloud Strategy
        With Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition (April 2009), an enhanced version of Eucalyptus that uses the KVM hypervisor was integrated into the distribution. This allowed any user to deploy a cloud that matches the same API that AWS provides. This system is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC).


      • Five Features We Want to See in Ubuntu
        One of Linux's most touted advantages over Windows and Mac systems is that, on distributed systems like Ubuntu, you can install thousands of applications right from your system, without having to Google, download, double-click, and Next, Next, Next through installation screens. That advantage is lost if you put all your applications in a big pile of searchable stuff labeled "Graphics" or "Sound & Video"—or, even worse, ask users to copy-paste repository sources and installation commands into text files and terminals. Those are great backup and uber-geek solutions, but terribly off-putting to those just trying to get a system up and working.


      • Lubuntu: Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Bee
        Some complain that there is simply too much choice in the free software world and far too many Linux distributions. Well, now there’s another called Lubuntu. A derivative of Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop, it’s super light and very fast. Finally, there’s an Ubuntu perfectly suited to those older, low end machines!


      • After +10 years of Windows, I say NO MORE!
        After more than 10 years of using Windows, from Windows 3.1, 95, 2000, ME, NT, Millennium, Server 2003, XP, and *finally* Vista, I herein declare that Windows is a thing of the past.

        I worked for +6 years as an on-site IT Support, and 100% of the troubled computers run Windows. Windows is a great operating system that gets the cycle of consumption going. A highly publicized, well-lubed bloated, conglomerate of absolute garbage. Spyware, malware, defragmentation, bloated registery, 1 missing DLL file brings down an entire Operating System, service calls, endless upgrades, more RAM, more powerful CPU's, high-end builds *just* to run Windows "smoothly" and "efficiently."

        I can't recall the number of times of daunting, expensive upgrades to get Windows itching a bit faster, or teh occasional formats, unexplained Blue Screens of Death, unreliable Microsoft technical support, and the list goes on! You can have the latest, most expensive AntiVirus and Firewall to protect precious Windows that comes crashing under its own weight.


      • Test Drive of Spri Linux Beta
        The Spri Beta 2.11 version is based on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and comes in a 340MB ISO file, quite close in filesize to the Lubuntu beta that we wrote about last week. Nothing special kernel-wise, it's the default 2.6.28-15 kernel that is in Ubuntu right now, and IceWM's version is 1.2.37.












  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-ready computer lives on the edge
      Eurotech announced a Linux-compatible edge controller for aggregating and communicating data from edge devices, sensors, and monitors using its Everyware Software Framework (ESF) Java framework. The customizable Helios computer runs on an Intel Atom Z5xx processor, offers gigabit Ethernet and serial ports, and has five USB ports, says Eurotech.


    • Cortex-A8 dev system supports Linux
      Direct Insight announced a SODIMM-sized CPU module that runs Linux on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor. Available with a separate 90 x 90mm breakout board, the SwiftModule-OM includes up to 256MB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage, Ethernet, and optional WiFi, the company says.




    • Phones

      • Nokia World: sink or swim
        Among the announcements are plans to integrate products and services into new devices – such as the soon-to-be launched Linux-based N900 and its first laptop, the Booklet 3G – through partnerships.


      • Embedded software giant launches Android service
        Telecom software vendor Enea has launched an Enea Android Competence Center in Lund, Sweden to provide professional software development services for Android. Meanwhile, an eWEEK opinion piece argues that although Android is underestimated by many in the mobile industry, the open source mobile platform could emerge as the smartphone winner.


      • Motorola Unveils Details of its Android Platform Play, Shows Cliq Phone
        This morning at GigaOm's Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco, Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, Co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of the company's Mobile Devices division, unveiled Motorola's Android platform play. Motorola is going to be placing large bets on the open source operating system over the coming years, but is coming out of the gate with just two Android phones.


      • Hacking the webOS
        In previous articles we have examined the market positioning of the Palm pre and the operating system it rode in on — the webOS. In this article I would like to dispense with the marketing speak and jump in a bit deeper. We are going to look at the webOS from the inside-out by actually modifying one of the built-in applications. Don’t worry, if all goes well, we won’t actually hurt anything. Or, if you prefer you can always deviate from the prescribed course and attempt to make permanent changes to your device. The choice is yours. I am going to be working via the development environment’s Emulator, but the changes we are making here may also be made to a rooted device. Let’s get started.












Free Software/Open Source

  • Kings of open source monitoring
    Built on open source, OpenNMS and Zenoss Enterprise take different paths to rich, scalable, and extensible network and systems monitoring


  • Software Freedom Day at Best Buy
    Hello and welcome. Microsoft has begun to train Best Buy associates on the virtues of Windows 7 over GNU/Linux for netbooks.

    Since Software Freedom Day is on September 19th, 2009(2 weeks away), Best Buy seems like a great place to hand out CDs and flyers encouraging people to try GNU/Linux on their laptops and desktops before they buy. In the coming days, we'll be putting up resources to help you at your local Best Buy to make this project a huge success!


  • Software lands award
    The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and Boston-based IT consulting firm Optaros Inc. won an innovation award in a contest sponsored by Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the quasi-public authority announced in a press release today.


  • Credativ Offers Support for Virtually Any Open Source App or Platform
    You can find a list of projects that Credative supports here. It supports GnuCash (accounting), MySQL, PostgreSQL, GNOME, KDE, Moodle, OpenOffice, Asterisk (VoIP/PBX), almost all major Linux distros, Apache, Thunderbird (e-mail), and even many development languages, ranging from Bazaar to Git, among others. In fact, if the support is good for Credativ's whole list, the combination of free, open source software and dependable support could be achievable for many businesses, small and large.


  • The HIMSS HIE Open Source Task Force is seeking volunteers!
    The purpose of the FY10 Open Source task force is to develop a white paper focused on open source deployments and opportunities of this technology solution within HIE.


  • Eucalyptus Supports VMware Hypervisor
    Eucalyptus Systems has announced it will support VMware's ESX hypervisor and vSphere 4 virtual machine infrastructure as the foundation for a private cloud.


  • The Business of Voting Machines
    More fundamentally, Congress, the states and cities should look for ways to have governments own and manage their voting machines, as the reform group FairVote has advocated. It makes no sense to allow private companies to count votes using secret, proprietary software. The federal government and the states should also require that all electronic voting machines produce a paper record of every vote and mandate random hand counts to ensure the reliability of the results.


  • EFI-X Mac hack dongle accused of stealing GNU code
    The adapter promised to take a computer built from standard PC components and allow Mac OS X to be installed on it, without the usual patching and tweaking required for a regular “Hackint0sh”. However, as one EFI-X owner has discovered, it seems the company did little more than repackage Chameleon/Boot-132 bootloader code onto a DRM-encrypted USB stick.


  • US gov sites embrace GooHoo instant logins
    Hoping to make it easier for American citizens to log into and use federal web sites, the US government has embraced not one but two digital identity standards: OpenID and InfoCard.




Leftovers

  • Oracle to continue supporting SPARC/Solaris
    Appeared as a full page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal. You have to admit Larry Ellison that he has a sense of humor.




  • AstroTurf







  • Censorship/Web Abuse

    • Oz government sites floored in firewall protests
      Hackers reportedly knocked over the website of Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd for a few minutes on Wednesday in an apparent protest against government plans for compulsory internet content filtering.








  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • P2P pushes IPv6 surge
      IPv6 traffic levels surged over the last 12 months, with the 15-fold increase down to just one application and one ISP, according to a study by Arbor Networks.

      Support for IPv6 in €µTorrent version 1.8, a version of the world's most popular BitTorrent client released in August 2008, had a huge effect.


    • Anti-Piracy Boss Confiscates Confiscated Hacker Laptop
      Tim Kuik, managing director of Dutch anti-piracy gang BREIN, has publicly admitted that he’s currently using a Sony VAIO laptop previously confiscated from a ‘hacker’. Although he doesn’t elaborate on how he obtained the machine, it is hard not to conclude that it has been misappropriated.


    • Bad Ideas: Trying To Make Content More Like Physical Property
      It shows an out-of-date understanding of economics. While it may mean that you can't directly create a (paid) market in that private good, it opens up and enables many more markets. Going back to the food analogy: if you had many more people in the world who weren't hungry, and didn't have to spend all their money on food or food production, would that be good or bad for the economy? It seems rather obvious that it would be good, as money could be spent on higher level things that expand the economy.


    • Musicians hit out at piracy plans
      An alliance of music stars, songwriters and record producers has spoken out against UK government proposals to kick file-sharers off the internet.








Recent Techrights' Posts

With 9 Mentions of Azure In Its Latest Blog Post, Canonical is Again Promoting Microsoft and Intel Vendor Lock-in, Surveillance, Back Doors, Considerable Power Waste, and Defects That Cannot be Fixed
Microsoft did not even have to buy Canonical (for Canonical to act like it happened)
Links 28/03/2024: GAFAM Replacing Full-Time Workers With Interns Now
Links for the day
Consent & Debian's illegitimate constitution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The Time Our Server Host Died in a Car Accident
If Debian has internal problems, then they need to be illuminated and then tackled, at the very least in order to ensure we do not end up with "Deadian"
China's New 'IT' Rules Are a Massive Headache for Microsoft
On the issue of China we're neutral except when it comes to human rights issues
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 27, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 27, 2024
WeMakeFedora.org: harassment decision, victory for volunteers and Fedora Foundations
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 27/03/2024: Terrorism Grows in Africa, Unemployment in Finland Rose Sharply in a Year, Chinese Aggression Escalates
Links for the day
Links 27/03/2024: Ericsson and Tencent Layoffs
Links for the day
Amid Online Reports of XBox Sales Collapsing, Mass Layoffs in More Teams, and Windows Making Things Worse (Admission of Losses, Rumours About XBox Canceled as a Hardware Unit)...
Windows has loads of issues, also as a gaming platform
Links 27/03/2024: BBC Resorts to CG Cruft, Akamai Blocking Blunders in Piracy Shield
Links for the day
Android Approaches 90% of the Operating Systems Market in Chad (Windows Down From 99.5% 15 Years Ago to Just 2.5% Right Now)
Windows is down to about 2% on the Web-connected client side as measured by statCounter
Sainsbury's: Let Them Eat Yoghurts (and Microsoft Downtimes When They Need Proper Food)
a social control media 'scandal' this week
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Windows/Client at Microsoft Falling Sharply (Well Over 10% Decline Every Quarter), So For His Next Trick the Ponzi in Chief Merges Units, Spices Everything Up With "AI"
Hiding the steep decline of Windows/Client at Microsoft?
Free technology in housing and construction
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
We Need Open Standards With Free Software Implementations, Not "Interoperability" Alone
Sadly we're confronting misguided managers and a bunch of clowns trying to herd us all - sometimes without consent - into "clown computing"
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month
Microsoft is the "2%", just like Windows in some countries
Links 26/03/2024: Inflation Problems, Strikes in Finland
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/03/2024: Losing Children, Carbon Tax Discussed
Links for the day
Mark Shuttleworth resigns from Debian: volunteer suicide and Albania questions unanswered, mass resignations continue
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 26/03/2024: 6,000 Layoffs at Dell, Microsoft “XBox is in Real Trouble as a Hardware Manufacturer”
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/03/2024: Microsofters Still Trying to 'Extend' Gemini Protocol
Links for the day
Look What IBM's Red Hat is Turning CentOS Into
For 17 years our site ran on CentOS. Thankfully we're done with that...
The Julian Paul Assange Verdict: The High Court Has Granted Assange Leave to Appeal Extradition to the United States, Decision Adjourned to May 20th Pending Assurances
The decision is out
The Microsoft and Apple Antitrust Issues Have Some But Not Many Commonalities
gist of the comparison to Microsoft
ZDNet, Sponsored by Microsoft for Paid-for Propaganda (in 'Article' Clothing), Has Added Pop-Up or Overlay to All Pages, Saying "813 Partners Will Store and Access Information on Your Device"
Avoiding ZDNet may become imperative given what it has turned into
Julian Assange Verdict 3 Hours Away
Their decision is due to be published at 1030 GMT
People Who Cover Suicide Aren't Suicidal
Assange didn't just "deteriorate". This deterioration was involuntary and very much imposed upon him.
Overworking Kills
The body usually (but not always) knows best
Former Red Hat Chief (CEO), Who Decided to Leave the Company Earlier This Month, Talks About "Cloud Company Red Hat" to CNBC
shows a lack of foresight and dependence on buzzwords
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 25, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, March 25, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Discord Does Not Make Money, It's Spying on People and Selling Data/Control (38% is Allegedly Controlled by the Communist Party of China)
a considerable share exists
In At Least Two Nations Windows is Now Measured at 2% "Market Share" (Microsoft Really Does Not Want People to Notice That)
Ignore the mindless "AI"-washing
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Still Has Hundreds of Thousands of Simultaneously-Online Unique Users
The scale of IRC