04.14.10

Links 14/4/2010: Fedora 13 Beta/Previews, RabbitMQ Bought

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux
- Distributions
- Devices/Embedded
Free Software/Open Source
Leftovers
Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

Schooner adds DR to SQL and cache appliances

This is the add-on to Linux that Schooner has created that mashes up the cores and threads in the Xeon processors and the main memory and flash drives and controls access to threads and memory and interleaves them in a more efficient manner than a typical Linux box can do. This SOE does not modify the Linux kernel itself, but creates very efficient and thread-aware userspaces for Schooner’s own blackbox, reverse-engineered, Memecached clone or Oracle’s MySQL Enterprise Edition database (which it licenses from Oracle) to run.
Choosing The Best Linux Filesystem For Your PC

If you’re a Linux user, you’ve likely been asked at some point if you want Ext3, Ext4, XFS, ReiserFS, Btrfs, or one of many other filesystem acronyms. This choice confuses new and old users alike, and like all software, the options change as technology improves. Many people probably don’t care what filesystem they use as long as it’s stable and reasonably fast, but how do you know which one that is? This guide will attempt to cover the basic differences between the most common options, and provide the pros and cons of each choice.
Applications
- Containers vs. Hypervisors: Choosing the Best Virtualization Technology
- What is the best Ubuntu system cleaner? You decide! [Poll]
  
  Now over to you: What’s your favourite system cleaning application? Poll closes in one weeks time.
- Instructionals
- Games
  - Alien Arena on netbook
    
    Alien Arena is a free, stand-alone deathmatch game based on source code released by id Software (specifically Quake 2). Begun by COR Entertainment in 2004, the game combines a 1950s-era sci-fi atmosphere with gameplay similar to the Quake, Doom, and Unreal Tournament series. Alien Arena focuses mainly on online multiplayer action, although it does contain single-player campaigns against bots.
  - Version 1.0 of open source Transport Tycoon Deluxe clone released
    
    After more than 6 years of development, the OpenTTD developers have announced the availability of version 1.0 of their open source Transport Tycoon Deluxe clone. The urban planning and simulation game clone includes a number of improvements on the original, such as multi-player support and bigger maps.
  - Dolphin, the Wii and GameCube emulator, has its first post-open source release. It’s really good.
    
    Around two years ago, Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, went open source. Today marks the first official release since that magical day. And let me tell you something: Dolphin works really, really well. Give it a shot when you have a chance.
Desktop Environments
- K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
  - Aaron Seigo on the Future of KDE
    
    Another example is the new direction for Krita, KOffice’s rasterized graphic program. For a long time, Seigo says, the sub-project wasn’t sure “If they were a drawing app, or maybe a photo retouching app, or what-the-hell were they?”
    
    At a recent developers’ sprint, Krita enlisted design expert Peter Sikking, who has also worked with the GIMP, to help the sub-project find direction.
  - The Future of KDE
    
    This is an example of where I would like to see more effort put into the PR end of KDE. Instead of defending 4.0, move on and break down and hype up some of these new features! They are worth talking about – and they are worth explaining to potential users.
- GNOME Desktop
  - (Yet) Another redesign of Nautilus
    
    So Nautilus is long overdue for a redesign and many people like Izo and the elementary project have had a crack at what they think makes a good Nautilus and you will no doubt notice some similarities in design. I hear you scream “Well why are you jumping on the bandwagon and doing something others have already done?!” There are two reasons: firstly, I want to learn more about User Interface design and Human Computer Interaction – Nautilus is a fairly easy application to redesign. Secondly, this is going to be an example of why we need better user usage statistics, and how we can get them that I will be discussing at the next Ubuntu Developer Summit in Brussels next month.
Distributions
- New Releases
  - Antix M8.5 for Lite Computers is Available
    
    9 months since the release of antiX-M8.2, the antiX-team announce that antiX MEPIS 8.5 ‘Marek Edelman’ – a fast, light, flexible and complete desktop and livecd based on SimplyMEPIS and Debian Testing – is now available in full and base versions (686 and 486 kernel). This release defaults to a fully customised icewm desktop (fluxbox, wmii and dwm are also installed) using a SimplyMEPIS 2.6.32-11 kernel, tweaked MEPIS Assistants for better compatibility in antiX and the usual range of applications for desktop use. Iceape for internet needs, Abiword and gnumeric for office use, xmms and goggles music manager for audio, gxine, mplayer and gnome-mplayer for video, wicd and ceni for network connection, pidgin for chat. Many cli apps are also included such as Alpine for email, moc for audio, links2 for browsing, abcde and ripit for cd ripping and much more. New features include live with persistence, ‘remaster on the fly’, new boot cheatcodes for setting dpi and desktop windows manager, antix2usb to easily install to usb stick. 12 languages are fully supported out of the box with the language chosen at live CD boot carrying over to install.
  - VortexBox 1.3 released
    
    VortexBox 1.3 released today. This release includes lots of new features and bug fixes. We have the latest version of SqueezeBox Server and all the latest versions of the 3rd party projects that make up VortexBox. We have also added Subsonic a new GUI that allows you to manage your music collection and stream it to iPods and Android players. New features include
  - Parted Magic 4.10
    
    Parted Magic 4.10 updates to grep-2.6.3, busybox-1.16.1, simpleburn-1.5.0, sshfs-fuse-2.2, linux-2.6.32.11. There are a few new programs as well. They are encfs_1.5.2, gencfs-1.0.0, gsshfs-1.0.0, rlog-1.4, unetbootin-429, and emelfm2-0.6.0. Parted was patched with updates from Ubuntu to reverse a decision to use a BLKRRPART instead of the BLKPG ioctls that worked. GPicView doesn’t segfault anymore. FAT32 file systems now mount as UTF8 by default. Many enhancements were made to the handing of SCSI device at boot. Creating bookmarks with Chromium no longer crashes the program.
  - MOPSLinux 7.0
  - Dragora GNU/Linux 2.0
  - PelicanHPC GNU Linux
    
    # 12 Apr. 2010. Version 2.1 is out
    
    * uses the simplified make_pelican
    * back to a Lenny base
    * Open MPI, Octave, openmpi_ext are latest versions, compiled from source
    * ganglia, slurm and ifenslave have been removed. The emphasis is back on simplicit
  - Xange (formerly Vixta) 2010.04
  - PLoP Linux 4.0.5 released
    
    update: kernel 2.6.33.2, cvs 1.12.13, fsarchiver 0.6.8, ntfs-3g 2010.3.6AR.4, partclone 0.2.8, parted 2.2, syslinux 3.86, lz utils 4.999.9, dhcp 4.1.1, bind 9.7.0-P1, samba 3.5.2, openssl 1.0.0, openssh 5.4p1, grub2 1.98, useavast script, usefprot script, usb zip file, splash screen
  - Distribution Release: GParted LiveCD 0.5.2-7
  - SystemRescueCd 1.5.2
  - [Freenas-announce] FreeNAS 0.7.1 (Shere) Available
- Red Hat Family
  - Advantage: Red Hat
    
    Linux software company Red Hat is in the enviable position of benefitting from several near-term trends in the information technology industry, according to an analyst who recently initiated coverage of the Raleigh-based business.
    
    UBS analyst Brent Thill rates Red Hat shares a “buy” and has a 12-month price target of $35. Red Hat shares were trading at $30.94, up 13 cents, at mid-day today. The company’s shares were hovering around $17 last May.
  - Fedora
    - Fedora 13: Beta and graphics driver test week
      
      The Fedora project has released the beta of the Fedora 13 Linux distribution, named after rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard, and it is now available to download. Like the alpha version released five weeks ago, the first and only beta has been released a week later than originally planned. This has prompted the project administrators to postpone the final release date of Fedora 13 by a week and it is now rescheduled for the 18th of May.
    - Announcing the release of Fedora 13 Beta
    - Fedora tempts fate with Apollo 13 beta
    - Fedora 13 Beta Released
    - Fedora 13 beta released with many goodies for the enterprise
      
      The popular Linux distribution, Fedora 13, has been released to its final beta and is chock full of features for enterprise use. Code-named Goddard, the beta version was released on Tuesday with the final version slated for May 18.
    - The Joy of Betas: Fedora 13 Beta Released Today
      
      Fedora 13, also known as “Goddard,” comes packed with a bunch of new features that are going to benefit not only Fedora users, but most Linux users no matter what distribution they’re using. For example, F13 offers Zarafa — a groupware offering that’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Testing in Fedora will help everybody using Zarafa, not just the Fedora community.
    - Fedora 13 Beta – First installation
      
      That was my first installation of Fedora 13 Beta. I also updated 136 programs. I will test Fedora 13 Beta more the next days and sum it up in another post. If you have any good tips or ideas about Fedora 13 Beta, please let me know.
    - Fedora 13 – Ubuntu’s smart but less attractive cousin
      
      Other features in Fedora 13 include automatic printer driver installation – which means if you plug-in a supported printer the driver is downloaded and installed automatically. It’s not the most exciting feature we’ve seen, but it does add another, “it-just-works” element to the already very user-friendly distro.
- Ubuntu
  - Ubuntu: Up and Running
    
    This popular Linux-based operating system is perfect for people with little technical background. It’s simple to install, and easy to use — with a strong focus on security.
Devices/Embedded
- Phones
  - Will Palm Wave Goodbye?
    
    Comparison with the iPhone are inevitable but, unlike Apple, Palm offers:
    
    * a multi-tasking OS (that’s coming to the iPhone, but the Pre had it from day 1)
    * a Flash player (coming soon)
    * a pull-down qwerty keyboard as well as the touch-screen
    * a free SDK and virtual phone available to Windows, Mac and Linux developers
    * a less restricted App Catalog which permits emulators — such as one which allows users to run thousands of legacy Palm OS applications
    * a ‘homebrew’ application market without an approval process.
  - Nokia
    - MeeGo Linux coming to netbooks, smartbooks soon
      
      The folks behind the MeeGo Linux project launched the first public beta version of the operating system recently. But that’s just the first step. MeeGo is backed by Intel and Nokia, and they have big plans to get the paltform on all sorts of devices including netbooks and smartphones soon.
      
      The netbook version of MeeGo doesn’t look like anything all that new if you’ve been following Moblin Linux for a while. MeeGo was born out of the merger of the Moblin and Maemo projects. And it looks like the UI is mostly Moblin-based, with a heavy dose of home screen widgets for checking your email, seeing status updates from your contacts, and launching apps. There are tabs along the top of the user interface for launching different zones, including a people zone (for your contacts) or a media zone for playing music and movies.
  - Android
    - Speakers Corner: First on the Android bandwagon
      
      Google’s open source Android platform was an intriguing prospect for a manufacturer right from the beginning. The fact it is open source means it has huge potential. But, at the time of launch, it was totally unknown and totally unproven, even if it had the Google brand attached to it.
- Sub-notebooks
  - OLPC’s Negroponte Honored by Lego Group
    
    Today the Denmark-based Lego Group, of plastic brick fame, announced that it has awarded its $100,000 Lego Prize to Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.
- Tablets
  - Google’s open-source Flash-supporting tablet to take on Apple’s iPad
    
    The company will apparently be working in “stealth mode” while experimenting with content publishers and the device.

Free Software/Open Source

No Permission Needed: Contribute Without Fear

This came up in Randal Schwartz’s keynote and in Amber Graner’s talk about her work with Ubuntu, as well as some of the “hallway track” during the fest. Talk to any successful contributor, and you’ll find someone who has been motivated enough to jump in without waiting for an invite. Look at any successful and healthy open source project, and you’ll find that it’s a permissive culture that invites fearless contribution.
Seismic Tool-Kit Helps Scientists Research Earthquakes
BigBlueButton Brings Video Conferencing to Classrooms

BigBlueButton is a free, open source, server-run project designed to run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It’s built on more than 14 open source components like Asterisk, MySQL, ActiveMQ, and more. BigBlueButton integrates with open source content management system Moodle and a handful of other popular open source projects.
Ball Aerospace Expands Opticks Open Source Software

Ball Aerospace launched Opticks in 2007 as its first open source software project designed to enable detailed analysis of remote sensing data and complement strategy promoted by the Department of Defense’s Open Technology Development Roadmap. Opticks is used by scientists and analysts within the DoD community to analyze remote sensing data and produce actionable intelligence.
IBM proclaims middleware dominance

If the technology achieves the same result and is cheaper, users will sooner or later catch on. This is the basic adoption model that we’ve seen for the last 10 years in the open-source world as OSS vendors focused on providing a “good enough” solution at a substantially lower cost.
Elance: Mobile development, open source, social media skills in high demand

Elance also reported that open source technologies represent 20 percent of the IT Top 50 skills list. “Open source content management systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are currently driving the movement with extremely high demand; while database, mobile, eCommerce, and web server technology platforms closely follow,” the company said.

Read more: Elance: Mobile development, open source, social media skills in high demand – Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:
Elance Report Reveals More Businesses Turning to Online Talent to Drive their Economic Recovery

Open Source on the Rise – Businesses and entrepreneurs continue to adopt open source platforms for a variety of reasons, including complete customization and community development. Currently, open source technologies represent 20% of the IT Top 50 Skills list. Open source content management systems like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal, are currently driving the movement with extremely high demand, while database, mobile, eCommerce, and web server technology platforms closely follow.
Free and Open: 18 No-Cost Solutions for Your Enterprise Network

There are many ways to save money on the network. Small businesses can even get enterprise features without spending top dollar. In this piece, I’ll highlight many different operating systems, routers, services, applications and servers — all of which are free — most open source.
Communications for the rest: Rowe and the Mesh Potato

He is also involved in a free telephony project using similar components, building a network in East Timor, and developing an open source low bitrate speech codec.

[...]

And again, his wry humour kicks in: “The idea of having a lot of money horrifies me. Too much responsibility.”

Rowe has given presentations at the last three Australian national Linux conferences. “I still remember the thunderous applause from the first presentation on the Free telephony Project. Meant a lot. Just getting _into_ LCA means a lot – the standard is so high,” he says. “Not sure about the long term effect on my project, but mixing with geeks at LCA is a good thing. I think I am getting more out of LCA each year as I mature as an open source developer.”
Open innovation is coming of age

The admirable wikihow.com, which uses crowdsourcing to generate “How to” videos that attract 25 million visitors a month, won the Co-creation award, while Open Office, the open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office, won the Open Source Software section in recognition of the progress that has been made over the years to make it more user-friendly.

[...]

The trouble is that this Kremlinesque approach has resulted in such beautiful game-changing products as the iPhone and iPad that are a delight to use as reported in the Observer. Contrast that with Google’s adoption of open source software for its Android phones. This is much better in theory as it allows developers to do their own thing but in practice, at least so far, this results in all sorts of different software versions that don’t always work too well on the varying sizes and hardware of different Android phones. As Steven Johnson has pointed out, Steve Jobs has turned a walled garden into a rainforest.

There is no doubt that open source solutions are on a roll and there are lots of areas where they will sweep all before them. The problem yet to be solved is how to harness the freedom and creativity that open collaboration offers with the need to have consumer friendly products that non-geeks will want to buy with their own money.
SunGard Higher Education Launches Industry’s First ERP Community Source Initiative

SunGard Higher Education and its customers have launched a Community Source Initiative — the first and only vendor-supported community source forum dedicated to higher education Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. The initiative is designed to bring together the insights and experience of SunGard Higher Education’s extensive user community for the benefit of all institutions; make functionality available faster; and help ensure product quality through functional and technical review.
India
- Tech students out to give software firms run for money
  
  They are the new whiz kids on the block and offer a “better and more affordable” version of popular software. Meet the team of Open Source Software, a community initiative started by a group of engineering students who were in the city to promote their programme during a one-day camp held at Chitkara Business School today.
- The Guard That Costs Nothing
  
  FOSS is not just about cost, it is also about freedom. Your freedom to modify the software to your needs. Most big businesses that I know of are deploying or have deployed open source software not only for security but for mission-critical applications as well. The mascot of the open source world–the Linux operating system, is relatively more secure from threats such as viruses and can be deployed for free. Linux distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc, cost nothing and provide greater security.
- Crafting the right code
  
  The precise reason that Software craftsmanship lays its emphasis more on the individual coding abilities of the professional, devoid of financial concerns like direct remuneration, ability of the code to translate into financial gain – short term or otherwise – and the overall ‘health’ of a software code, has seen its popularity among Open Source enthusiasts.
Mozilla
- Beyond the Browser: Messaging As A Future For Mozilla
  
  Mozilla has long been developing its free, open source Thunderbird e-mail platform, which is much improved in its latest version. It isn’t a revolutionary game-changer, though, and doesn’t have some of the plumbing needed to supplant Microsoft Exchange-centric e-mail deployments in enterprises.
Events
- DrupalCon Preview: Q&A With Chapter Three’s Zack Rosen
- Press Release: Moodlerooms Presenting at Annual Palmetto Open Source Software Conference, Executive to Discuss Open-Source Software’s Impact on Universities
  
  Moodlerooms, Inc., provider of the enterprise learning management system, joule, is pleased to announce its participation in the third annual Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON). Taking place April 15 – 17, POSSCON strives to spread awareness of quality open-source educational solutions to the Southeastern United States.
- OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2010
  
  This year’s European OpenNMS User Conference will take place on the 6th and 7th of May, 2010 at the Le Méridien Parkhotel in Frankfurt, Germany. OpenNMS is an open source network management platform, licensed under the GPL, which won a Bossie (Best of Open Source Software Award) from InfoWorld in 2009 in the Networking and Network Management category.
Business
- VMware SpringSources for open source Rabbit
  
  Rabbit Technolgies CEO Alexis Richardson tells us that the company’s open source messaging system, dubbed RabbitMQ, is used by NASA’s Nebula project, a private infrastructure cloud that will apparently be used to power applications across the US federal government.
Releases
- Xen.org updates open source Xen hypervisor
  
  Xen.org has released a new version of open source Xen hypervisor software, which leverages new network cards optimised for virtualisation and promises users performance and scalability gains for any level of enterprise or cloud application workload.
Government
- Code ownership the key for government open source
  
  This is a huge difference and there are advantages in both approaches:
  
  1. Government owning code means government power increasing. Those who don’t like to see government power increasing may oppose such moves.
  2. Government owning code means the buck stops there. With vendor code you can blame the vendor when things go wrong. When the code is yours you can’t.
- Italian Constitutional Court Says Public Administrations Can Favour Open Source
- US
  - Cities of the Future, Part 4: Open Source Avenue
    
    For example, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is using a solution combining open source business intelligence software from JasperSoft and business process software from HandySoft to increase operational efficiency and organizational effectiveness. This will save it 75 people-hours a day and more than US$1.5 million a year.
  - The Department of Defense and Open Source Software
- UK
  - Nick Clegg: LibDems would scrap ID cards, biometric passports and child database
    
    We will take a totally different approach. We will end the disasters with a full review of government IT procurement, looking, for example, at the potential for cloud computing to save money, and at more use of open source software too.
  - Lib Dems promise to invest in tech start-ups
    
    The Liberal Democrat culture spokesman Don Foster has outlined his party’s policies on strengthening the digital economy, using open source in government IT and protecting consumer data, among other issues.
  - SMEs and open source players championed in Tory manifesto
    
    The Conservative Party hopes to get more SMEs and open source specialists involved in public sector IT provision by publishing £10,000-plus tender documents online.
Openness
- Does the world need another chair?
  
  He then introduced the evening’s theme “Design x Sustainability x Open Source,” and explained how the four Japanese speakers are pioneers in adapting to the open source movement and implementing their creativity in actual projects.
  
  Collaboration and Open Source is the fundamental mindset behind Designers Accord. According to Yosh, when we talk about sustainability, the same mindset should be applied. We are entering an era of “unsustainability” and a point of no return, when sooner or later we would all have to think about how we are going to sustain our own lives and the planet we live in.
Programming
- SourceForge Now Offers Free, Global Distribution Service to Every Open Source Project
  
  In addition to providing projects with increased external visibility, SourceForge Downloads also includes a new series of robust reporting tools and controls. Project administrators and developers can receive key statistics on a project’s performance, all free of charge.
Google
- Google TV: Another Reason Open Sourcing VP8 Matters
  
  Google’s decision to open source On2 Technology’s VP8 video codec at its Google I/O developer conference next month is not only a huge boon for HTML5 web video and a blow against Adobe’s Flash. It’s also clearly aimed at optimizing video playback on a number of devices, like the much-rumored Google TV platform as well as upcoming Android tablet PCs.
- Comodo Dragon: A Chromium Browser With Extra Armor

Leftovers

Environment
- 100+ Groups Join Scientists and Development Experts in Urging Senate to “Strip the GM Mandate” from the Global Food Security Act
  
  Experts, scientists and advocates from around the world petitioned the U.S. Senate today in a concerted attempt to strip what they term a “stealth corporate giveaway” embedded in a foreign aid bill which is expected to hit the Senate floor soon. The “Global Food Security Act” (S.384), sponsored by Senators Casey (D-PA) and Lugar (R-IN), is intended to reform aid programs to focus on longer-term agricultural development, and restructure aid agencies to better respond to crises. While lauding the bill’s intentions, the petitioners object to a clause earmarking one agricultural technology (genetically modified – GM crops) for potentially billions of dollars in federal funding. $7.7 billion in U.S. funds are associated with the bill and no other farming methods or technologies are mentioned.