06.19.10

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Linux distribution migration: Planning for efficiency

  Migrating Linux is mostly about migrating services. To do this properly, there are two approaches. You can find out yourself what needs to be done, or you can use tools that analyze this for you. Apart from the services involved, migrating Linux is also about smoothly transitioning from one environment to another environment, without involving double work for your IT environment. If you have the appropriate system management tools in place, they can be very helpful. Finally, depending on the Linux distributions that you were using and that you are going to use, these might be a financial chapter as well. Check this with the new vendor of your choice. This vendor is going to earn your money and may be more than willing to help.

• When It Comes to Security, Openness Isn’t Always a Virtue – Rebuttals

  So what does it all mean? The transparency of free and open source software is increasingly recognized as an important benefit — even by experts studying software security, and even when they uncover occasional vulnerabilities.

  The “security through obscurity” argument may still be frequently uttered by those on the pro-proprietary side, but — at least, based on this debate — it lacks substance. Indeed, given the financial stakes for those on the proprietary side, one could easily make the case that a certain amount of FUD is to be expected.

  The growing ranks of FOSS proponents, then, should be heartened. When it comes to security, free and open source software has been held up, scrutinized, and declared superior.

• Server

  • IBM supercomputer to appear on ‘Jeopardy’

  • Porn’s Lessons on the Plentiful Possibilities of Perl and PHP

    Most of the world’s adult entertainment sites, a.k.a. porn sites, operate on a relatively thin budget, and almost all of them run on open source.

• Ballnux

  • High-end Android phone crashes the iPhone’s party at last

    The Captivate features Android 2.1 running on a 1GHz Samsung S5PC110 “Hummingbird” system-on-chip, a four-inch Super AMOLED display, 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, and a five-megapixel camera, says AT&T.

  • AT&T Singing Along With HTC’s Aria

• Graphics Stack

  • [NVIDIA] 256.35 (release candidate) for Linux x86/x86_64 released

    The 256.35 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86 is available for download via FTP.

  • Introducing The Cairo Gallium3D State Tracker

• Applications

  • 7 of the best Linux firewalls

    You’re walking down a dark alley, late at night, when suddenly someone jumps out at you and forces you to hand over your passport, your credit cards, and the keys to your car. This is a good analogy of what using the internet is like.

    Around every corner lurks danger, and with today’s always-on connections, you may have the internet equivalent of burglars without realising. For ultimate computer security, a firewall is similar to having a big, burly bodyguard walking down the street with you, keeping you safe. Whether it be your home or office network, a firewall distribution should be able to help you.

  • Open Source Multimedia Tools Make Sweet Music

    Hopefully you will download one of the distributions listed above, run it live and try out some of the applications I have listed here. Then we can continue investigating the FOSS multimedia world by looking closer at video and publishing multimedia works.

  • Almanah and RedNotebook: Easy, Elegant Journaling

  • Proprietary

    • Wine Announcement

      The Wine development release 1.2-rc4 is now available.

  • Instructionals

    • Weekend Project: Configure Your Keyboard Into Submission

    • Filter The Vuvuzela Horn Out of the World Cup; Learn JACK Routing on Linux

    • Automated Certificate Expiration Checks on CentOS

    • Virtualization With KVM On A Fedora 13 Server

    • Install Google Chrome browser in openSUSE

  • Games

    • UFO: Alien Invasion 2.3 released

      The UFO:AI development team is proud to announce the release of UFO: Alien Invasion Version 2.3. Two years in the making, this version features loads of new content, a dramatically improved rendering engine and extensive improvements to nearly every aspect of the game’s campaign and battle systems.

• K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • Report from Successful Multimedia and Edu Sprint in Randa

    43 persons (including organizers, designer, bugsquashers, and others) from 17 different countries gathered in Randa from Thursday 20 May to Tuesday 25 May. Why Randa? It is a marvelous place in the mountains of Switzerland where Mario Fux knew a house that would be perfect for KDE developers. Several groups that work on different parts of KDE had a chance to meet and mix in one house. Present were KDE-Education, Amarok, various multimedia people (Phonon, KMix, vlc) and Gluon developers.

  • KDE: you are welcome to contribute!

  • KDE: Week 23

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 Features Linux Kernel 2.6.34

      François Dupoux announced on June 18th the new SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 Linux-based operating system. Being powered by the alternative Linux kernel 2.6.34, and the standard 2.6.32.15 Linux kernel, SystemRescueCd 1.5.6 includes now the popular GParted 0.6.0 application for partitioning tasks with support for drives with sectors larger than 512 bytes. Moreover, the FSArchiver and Memtest86+ apps were also updated. Without further introduction, let’s take a closer look at the changes brought by SystemRescueCd 1.5.4…

  • Red Hat Family

    • Earnings Look Ahead: In 5 days, Red Hat Releases Its Quarterly Numbers (RHT)

      SmarTrend is bullish on shares of Red Hat and our subscribers were alerted to Buy on June 14, 2010 at $31.47. The stock has risen 1.4% since the alert was issued.

  • Debian Family

    • Code freeze for Debian 6.0 Squeeze expected in August

• Devices/Embedded

  • LinuxCertified Announces its next Linux Device Driver Development Course

    LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from June 28th – 30th, 2010.

  • Remote device servers hardened for industrial work

    Opengear announced three new UCLinux-based remote management device servers, focusing on industrial applications. In addition to the general-purpose, $475 ACM5004-2-I server, there’s a telecom-oriented ACM5004-2-I-SDC version with a 48V DC power supply, plus an extended-temperature ACM5004-2-T aimed at utility networks, the company says.

  • ARM11 dev kit supports Linux, Android

  • Tiny embedded device server offloads Ethernet networking chores

    Lantronix is also known for its XPort Pro embedded networking module, which it touts as the “world’s smallest Linux networking server.” The XPort Pro (pictured at right) measures 1.33 x 0.64 x 0.53 inches, and offers 8MB of SDRAM, 16MB of flash, RJ45 Ethernet and serial ports, a web server, SSH and SSL security, and IPv6 support.

  • Phones

    • Palm confirms new devices, webOS upgrade

    • Fujitsu and Toshiba to Merge Mobile Phone Units

      Toshiba, whose cellphone business has lost money for the last two years, accounted for about 4 percent of the Japanese market.

    • Nokia/MeeGo

      • Nokia N9 MeeGo slider leaks in early video tease?

        Let’s just put this out there: the image above was grabbed from a video that could be an early, leaked teaser for the N9, Nokia’s first handset to run the MeeGo OS. Could be.

      • MeeGo Community Metrics for May

    • Android

      • Half of Android users are stuck on old versions

        The good news for developers is that out of the six versions of Android only three, 1.5, 1.6 and 2.1 have widespread use. The figures also show that almost all Motorola Milestone and Droid users have now upgraded to Android 2.1.

      • Google: 50% Android devices now running 2.1

      • Google works on Gingerbread UI, preps Google Music

        Google’s Android team will focus on user interface issues in the upcoming “Gingerbread” release of Android in an attempt to dissuade handset vendors from adding their own UI layers, writes Michael Arrington in TechCrunch.

      • Browser privacy issue with DROID Incredible and HTC Sense UI widget?

        An astute reader stumbled upon an interesting bug with the HTC Incredible. The Incredible, with Sense UI, will periodically store screenshots of the contents of your web browser. The screen captures are a function of the HTC Sense UI bookmark widget

      • Droid X Is Coming To Beat The iPhone 4

        The super-phone war is about to start. The war was triggered back in 2007 when Apple announced its revolutionary iPhone. The market back then was scattered, primarily dragged by stagnated mobile operating systems. Times have changed with the arrival of Gnu/Linux ‘avatar’ in form of Android.

      • New Droid on the Way to Kick Some iPhone 4 Aspirations

        Verizon is elbowing its way into the Apple-dominated tech spotlight with the announcement that it’s going to make a big announcement next week, and it’s a very safe bet that it’s going to take the wraps off a new Droid smartphone. How will the newcomer compare to its popular brother? Bigger and faster, with a belt packed with fancier tools, no doubt.

      • KT brings the Nexus One to South Korea, complete with Froyo

        The Nexus One may have taken a little while to reach South Korea, but it looks like KT is doing its best to make up for lost time — the carrier has just announced that it will not only be offering the Nexus One, but that it will come complete with Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo).

      • Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG spin Android phones

        Motorola is prepping two high-end Android phones for summer release on Verizon — the 4.3-inch Droid X and a keyboard-enabled Droid 2 — say reports. Meanwhile, LG will ship 20 Android phones this year, and Sony Ericsson is readying a mid-range Xperia X8 Android model, say other reports.

      • Which Android? Sony Ericsson May Mix It Up With Xperia X8

        It appears that Sony Ericsson may deliver its Xperia X8 smartphone with Android version 1.6 in some parts of Europe and version 2.1 in others. The older version lacks some speed and performance enhancements, live wallpaper, built-in pinch-to-zoom capability and 3-D photo galleries. Still, many consumers are likely to find it adequate for their needs, according to Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • XO Laptops Revamped for Secondary School Pupils

      Uruguay has already ordered 90,000 of the new XO-HS notebooks, having previously taken receipt of almost 400,000 XO laptops for primary school children. The Uruguayan government is clearly eager to distribute computers among the young generation, and has also ordered 10,000 of the Intel Classmate PC laptops. With 230,000 high school students in total in Uruguay, there is scope for further orders, with delivery of the new PCs scheduled to begin in September this year.

  • Tablets

    • Buy a (tiny) DIY tablet kit for under $400

      Want a touchscreen tablet computer, but don’t feel like purchasing any of the pre-configured options already on the market? No problem, you can pick up a $400 kit that will let you build your own tablet.

    • Build your own tablet for less than the price of an iPad

    • Android tablet to take on iPad in Japan

      NEC is preparing an Android 2.1 tablet for the Japanese market based on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The LifeTouch offers a seven-inch, WVGA touchscreen, a SDHC slot, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, sensors, and a three-megapixel camera, says NEC.

Free Software/Open Source

• Zarafa unveils new framework

  On the second day of its 2010 Summercamp in Brussels, messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa has announced the launch of a new integration framework. The new groupware integration framework is based on SWIG and allows open source and commercial solutions to integrate with Zarafa’s Collaboration Platform, connecting calendars, mail, contacts and tasks to virtually any developer language. The new Python language Messaging API (MAPI) binding provides full MAPI access from Python – documentation is provided.

• Events

  • Linux security summit schedule now available

  • Governance session at Open World Forum

    FOSSBazaar, with the help of the QualiPSo project, have organized a governance session at Open World Forum in Paris.

  • Dinner With Winners of Supporting Membership Draw at LinuxTag

  • Akademy Announces 2010 Sponsors

    From July 3rd through July 10th the KDE community will gather in Tampere, Finland for our yearly Akademy conference. We are pleased to announce that, once again, a number of sponsors will be helping to make this event possible.

• Mozilla

  • Download Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0.5

    As fans gear up for the upcoming release of Thunderbird 3.1, Mozilla has made available an updated version of the current line, Thunderbird 3.0.5. It’s a bug-fixing release with no new features, though users should see an improvement in message-indexing speed. More than 60 bugs have been fixed in Thunderbird 3.0.5.

  • Mozilla’s next Thunderbird gives Gmailers hope

  • Mozilla releases Thunderbird 3.0.5

  • Thunderbird gets minor point update

• Healthcare

  • GNUmed – job openings

• BSD

  • FreeBSD 8.1-RC1 Available…

    The first Release Candidate for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites. Checksums for the images are at the bottom of this message.

• Project Releases

  • Parrot 2.5.0 “Cheops” Released

    On behalf of the Parrot team, I’m proud to announce Parrot 2.5.0 “Cheops”. Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Source: A Question of Evolution

    I met Matt Ridley once, when he was at The Economist, and I wrote a piece for him (I didn’t repeat the experience because their fees at the time were extraordinarily ungenerous). He was certainly a pleasant chap in person, but I have rather mixed feelings about his work.

    His early book “Genome” is brilliant – a clever promenade through our chromosomes, using the DNA and its features as a framework on which to hang various fascinating facts and figures. His latest work, alas, seems to have gone completely off the rails, as this take-down by George Monbiot indicates.

  • Open Public Data are so good that it’s hard to start explaining why

    Today I have participated to an international meeting in Madrid on the reuse of Public Sector Information. I came to gather as much information and food for thought as possible for my new research on Open Data for an Open Society and wasn’t deluded.

  • Flickr, stock photography and Creative Commons

    This is where the ethical and practical implications take place. I am not really too concerned about the Getty collection, I really thing that this is a good development. However, I am concerned about the potential negative impact on the take-up of CC licences in Flickr. By stating clearly that any CC licensed picture will be only eligible for the cheaper royalty-free licensing option, Getty has created a disincentive to licence under Creative Commons. While I give the Flickr community enough credit not to answer the siren’s call en masse, this could be a concern on the long run. We could have a two-tier Flickerverse of low-quality CC-licensed images, and high-quality content available only by paying fees to Getty.

• Programming

  • Managing Subversion repositories in the web browser

    CollabNet, an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) specialist and provider of distributed software development solutions, has introduced Subversion Edge, a distribution of the Subversion SCM (Software Configuration Management) tool. In addition to Subversion, which was initially developed by CollabNet and has since been donated to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the distribution includes the Apache web server and the ViewVC repository viewer, a browser-based directory management system.

  • NetBeans IDE 6.9 Release Adds JavaFX Composer and PHP Tools

    NetBeans is a competitive environment to the open source Eclipse IDE, which Oracle also backs. A new version of Eclipse is due out later this month.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Scribd’s Decision To Dump Flash Pays Off, User Engagement Triples

    Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.

Leftovers

• Oracle

  • DOJ sues Oracle for alleged overcharging

    The U.S. Justice Department has joined a whistleblower suit against Oracle that accuses it of defrauding the U.S. government.

    Filed back in May 2007 under the False Claims Act, the suit claims Oracle overcharged the federal government tens of millions of dollars by failing to offer it the same deep discounts the company offers commercial customers. That’s a real problem, because Oracle was obligated to do just that under the terms of the General Services Administration contract by which it was bound.

  • Oracle spikes HP’s Solaris OEM contract

    HP then went on for a few hundred words talking about how it would be happy to port ProLiant/Solaris customers to Windows or Linux – not just Red Hat and SUSE Linux, but Debian too – and reminding everyone that its Integrity HP-UX boxes exist. (Pity HP-UX doesn’t run on x64 iron, though.)

• Science

  • Danger, Stem Cell Tourists: Patient in Thailand Dies From Treatment

    A woman with kidney disease has died after receiving an experimental stem cell treatment at a private clinic in Thailand, and a postmortem examination of her kidneys revealed that the treatment was almost certainly responsible for her death. Last week we reported that Costa Rica’s health ministry had closed a stem cell clinic that catered to foreigners, which sparked lively debates around the Internet about whether patients should be able to willingly take on risks associated with experimental treatments. This new case offers a sobering reminder of what can happen when patients travel abroad looking for a miracle cure.

• Security/Aggression

  • FEMA, DHS Back Disaster Hero Game

    Legacy Interactive has announced plans to create a web-based game designed to teach kids how to prepare for hazards and emergencies.

    [...]

    FEMA claimed to have research which showed that “despite imminent threats and increased media attention, Americans today are no better prepared for a natural disaster or terrorist attack than they were in 2003.”

  • The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks

    On June 6, Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter of Wired reported that a 22-year-old U.S. Army Private in Iraq, Bradley Manning, had been detained after he “boasted” in an Internet chat — with convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo — of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video, a yet-to-be-published video of a civilian-killing air attack in Afghanistan, and “hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records.” Lamo, who holds himself out as a “journalist” and told Manning he was one, acted instead as government informant, notifying federal authorities of what Manning allegedly told him, and then proceeded to question Manning for days as he met with federal agents, leading to Manning’s detention.

  • Obama internet ‘kill switch’ proposed

    US President Barack Obama would be granted powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet under a new bill that describes the global internet as a US “national asset”.

• Environment

  • The oily operators behind the religious climate change disinformation front group, Cornwall Alliance

    Defenders of the dirty energy status quo, particularly the lobbyists and politicians associated with the oil and coal industry, have repeatedly trotted out a group of evangelical leaders known as the Cornwall Alliance to counter the growing sentiment in the evangelical community that anthropogenic climate change is a threat to God’s creation. Cornwall declares that true Christians believe “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.” In this repost, Wonk Room exposes the Big Oil funding behind the Cornwall Alliance

  • As oil spews in Gulf, BP chief at UK yacht race

    BP chief executive Tony Hayward, often criticized for being tone-deaf to U.S. concerns about the worst oil spill in American history, took time off Saturday to attend a glitzy yacht race off England’s Isle of Wight.

• Finance

  • China indicates it will allow yuan to strengthen

    China has indicated it will allow the yuan to rise against the dollar and other Western currencies.

    The Chinese central bank announced it would make its exchange rate mechanism “more flexible”, but it gave no details about the timing or extent of changes.

    The yuan has been effectively pegged to the dollar, drawing criticism that China was protecting its exporters.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Corporations Can’t Fool California?

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Internet Freedom under pressure in Denmark

    On 27 May the Danish Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision which obliges internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that may contain – or link to other sites which contain – material which infringes copyrights (the Pirate Bay in this instance).

    The decision has rightly been criticized as a setback for internet freedom in Denmark. The decision attaches undue weight to the interests of copyright holders while ignoring obvious dangers of abuse, restrictions on internet freedom and access to information and the lack of any due process. The decision may lead to the blocking of websites that mainly includes content that does not infringe copyright and thus restrict the free flow of information. Moreover, by forcing ISP’s to police the Internet without due process the decision marks a dangerous precedent that is likely to include other ‘illegal’ or ‘offensive’ material in the future.

  • Does science really still have a problem with libel?

    Are there really still problems being caused for scientists and science writers caused by the English law of libel?

    On the face of it, that seems an odd question to be asked on this of all blogs.

    But it is an entirely serious question, and it is not one which is intended to be unduly provocative.

    Indeed, unless those of us who contend there is such a problem can answer this question in a calm, informed, reasoned, and ultimately persuasive manner, then our influence may be minimal in the upcoming debate on the legislative reform of libel.

  • Technical details of the Street View WiFi payload controversy

    The latest privacy controversy with Google is that while scanning for WiFi access-points in their Street View cars, they may have inadvertently captured data payloads containing private information (URLs, fragments of e-mails, and so on).

    Although some people are suspicious of their explanation, Google is almost certainly telling the truth when it claims it was an accident. The technology for WiFi scanning means it’s easy to inadvertently capture too much information, and be unaware of it.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • ‘No Bullshit’? Have we gone mad? ['No Bullshit' trademarked]

  • Britain’s BPI goes after Google

    The BPI, the RIAA’s UK counterpart, has gone up against the Holiest of Holies, American online advertising conglomerate Google, says Chilling Effects.

    Short for British Phonographic Industry, the BPI contributed to the British government’s Digital Ecomy bill, complete with its ACTA Three Strikes and you’re Off The Net element, with hardly a murmur from the UK lamescream media.