Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Welcome: One Thing to Know Before You Migrate to GNU/Linux

    The silly article goes on for lots of pages/clicks until five things are listed to denigrate GNU/Linux. The truth is there is only one thing to know about migrating to GNU/Linux. Any problems you encounter will be solvable and once solved will not recur.

  • Is Linux Really Harder to Use?

    When North Americans learn to drive a car, they learn to drive on the right side of the road. Those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, of course, learn to drive on the left. Neither option is “more difficult,” per se, they’re just different. Once you’re used to one approach, however, it can feel awkward at first to do the other.

    So it is with computer operating systems. Desktop Linux is simple, elegant and logical, but it works differently from Mac and Windows.

    In Linux, the graphical user interface (GUI) is optional, for instance. The desktop environment can be completely customized, and package managers let you install software in just a few clicks, no surfing the Web or searching for serial keys required.

  • If Linux is not for Everyone, Neither is Windows

    When contrasting Linux and Windows, one frequently hears the fallacy that Linux is not an OS anyone can use. Read this reaction about it. That recurrent argument is based on several misconceptions that I would like to discuss but, first, let us clarify something: there exists no such a thing as an easy, perfect OS. There is always a learning curve when using a system and the more you get exposed to an OS, the more “manageable” it seems. But easiness of use is only a perception, a mirage. Now, let us take a look at the misconceptions.

• Server

  • July 2010 Web Server Survey

    Microsoft also experienced a loss this month, serving 648k fewer hostnames worldwide and also losing 265k active sites. A big contributor to this was a loss of 388k hostnames due to lower activity on Microsoft Live Spaces.

  • Desperately Seeking LAMP 2.0

    Today, though, people are so lost in the fog of cloud computing, that they have largely forgotten about LAMP’s appeal. Cloud computing may well go beyond LAMP in terms of its power and potential, but so far it lags woefully behind LAMP in terms of simplicity and ease of implementation. Today, though, people are so lost in the fog of cloud computing, that they have largely forgotten about LAMP’s appeal. Cloud computing may well go beyond LAMP in terms of its power and potential, but so far it lags woefully behind LAMP in terms of simplicity and ease of implementation.

• Kernel Space

  • Enterprise Management Vendor Zenoss Joins The Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that open source enterprise IT management company Zenoss is its newest member.

• Applications

  • Microsoft Exchange Alternatives for Linux

    Looking for a Linux-friendly groupware suite that can take the place of Microsoft Exchange in your organization? You’ll find a wide range of alternatives for Linux that offer most (if not all) of Exchange’s functionality.

    If your organization has standardized on Microsoft Exchange, switching may be a bit tricky (but can be done). But if your organization hasn’t started down that path, it’s a good habit to avoid. The good news is you’ll find several robust Exchange alternatives for Linux.

  • Bibble 5, DAM for Linux, and data portability

    So I’m evaluating Bibble 5 Pro (version 5.1f). I had to process over 1,000 images this weekend and LightZone was killing me. I really like LightZone. But, damn… it is slow. It does have batch processing capabilities but they’re not particularly robust (there’s no way to apply some adjustments but not others, for example).

  • Gloobus Preview + Nautilus Elementary = Absolutely Beautiful!

    Gloobus Preview is a beautiful file preview application for Linux. Select a file and click space bar to have a quick preview of the file, as simple as that. And when I say file, they include music, videos, images, documents and everything else!

  • Instructionals

    • Latex editors and rubber

• Distributions

  • Debian Family

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

        As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks — with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks — are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.

      • Ubuntu 10.10’s New File System: btrfs by Christopher Tozzi

        As far as production goes, btrfs is not yet an appropriate choice; as its documentation makes explicitly clear, it is “not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review.” So while the Ubuntu installer might provide btrfs as an option, I wouldn’t go putting it on the root partition of any production system until it has matured a little more.

        All the same, the new file system promises a number of significant advances on both Ubuntu desktops and servers. In my experiments with it, it’s also worked pretty well, and I’m excited to explore the new possibilities it offers to Ubuntu users as it continues to develop.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android is Awesome

          The question becomes “Why do OEMs not push GNU/Linux?”. The answers are many. OEMs have a tight margin. If unit sales were to drop even a little, their margins and income could drop seriously. They do not want to take the risk so, at best, they want GNU/Linux to be a sideline as Dell has made it. That seems quite unwise in view of the performance of Android. Margins can increase quite a bit per PC if the licence for the OS is taken out of the total. An OEM can either increase share by cutting prices a bit more than competitors selling that other OS or an OEM could charge what they would charge for that other OS and keep the change, increasing margin. Combinations are also possible, cutting a bit in price while cutting out payments to M$. The fact that no large OEM has done this suggests that M$ is paying them handsomely to keep out GNU/Linux.

Free Software/Open Source

• 10 things traditional software customers want to know about open source

  I talk to many customers who have installed what I’ll call “traditional” or “commercial” software but what some people call “closed” or “proprietary” software. The most savvy customers understand that most traditional software contains a lot of open source software, and you need to think about open source not just at the application but also at the library level. These customers usually have enterprise installations and either run or outsource huge data centers, have multiple hardware and software platforms, and care a lot about quality of service, service level agreements, maintenance, support, and cost.

• Oracle

  • Will Illumos Bring OpenSolaris Back To Life?

    Today sees the launch of the Illumos Project, heralded last week in a message on the OpenSolaris mailing lists. The announcement caused much excitement, with many assuming it was a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris distribution.

  • Illumos sporks OpenSolaris

    If you were hoping that someone would fork the OpenSolaris operating system, you are going to have to settle for a spork. You know, half spoon and half fork. That, in essence, is what the Illumos, an alternative open source project to continue development on the core bits of OpenSolaris, is all about.

    The disgruntled OpenSolaris community has been ignored by Oracle since it acquired Sun Microsystems back in January, and the project’s governing board has threatened to commit ritual suicide by the end of August to try to get Oracle participating in the open source Solaris development effort.

  • OpenSolaris’ child, Illumos, goes forward without Oracle

    Nexenta, an open-source organization that’s been trying to “combine the OpenSolaris kernel with the GNU/Debian user experience has announced a new open-source effort called “Illumos”. Illumos, Nexenta proclaims “is a 100% community-driven and owned effort that aims to provide an alternative to a critical part of the OpenSolaris distribution, freeing it from dependence on Oracle’s good will.”

    This effort, Simon Phipps, former chief open-source officer for Sun and an Illumos supporter, said is not meant to be a fork of OpenSolaris. Still, as the group said in their announcement, “Oracle has significantly reduced their support for OpenSolaris as a distribution.” Actually, that’s too kind. Oracle has essentially ignored OpenSolaris and paid no attention to the OpenSolaris Governing Board.

  • Illumos launched as OpenSolaris derivative

• Funding

  • Status.net Gets $1.4M to Take Open-Source Twitter Into the Enterprise

    Status.net, which distributes open-source microblogging software similar to Twitter, has closed a round of financing that it plans to use to take its services into the enterprise market. The Montreal-based startup has raised $1.4 million from New York venture fund FirstMark Capital, along with BOLDstart Ventures, iNovia Capital and Montreal Start Up, and FirstMark partner Scott Switzer — founder of the open-source advertising platform OpenX — will join the company’s board of directors. The new round brings the total amount raised by Status.net to $2.3 million.

• Government

  • EU: Practical Guide to using Free Software in the Public Sector

    Thierry Aimé, member of the team of the French Ministry for the Budget, Public Accounts and the Civil Service, has authored a “Practical Guide to using Free Software in the Public Sector”.

• Licensing

  • BusyBox and the GPL Prevail Again

    I thought you’d want to hear about what’s just happened in the Software Freedom Conservancy v. Best Buy, et al case. It’s another BusyBox case regarding infringement of the GPL, mostly about high definition televisions with BusyBox in them, and while the case is not finished regarding other defendants, it’s certainly set another precedent. One of the defendants was Westinghouse Digital Technologies, LLC, which refused to participate in discovery. It had applied for a kind of bankruptcy equivalent in California. Judge Shira Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York has now granted Software Freedom Conservancy, a wing of Software Freedom Law Center, triple damages ($90,000) for willful copyright infringement, lawyer’s fees and costs ($47,865), an injunction against Westinghouse, and an order requiring Westinghouse to turn over all infringing equipment in its possession to the plaintiffs, to be donated to charity. So, presumably a lot of high-def TVs are on their way to charities.

• Openness/Sharing

  • How Lawyers Can Help Us to Share

    Berkeley attorney and Shareable.net contributing editor Janelle Orsi is the co-founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which aims to help social enterprises, worker-owned co-ops, and other mission-oriented enterprises sort through legal red tape. The co-author of The Sharing Solution, published by Nolo in 2009, Orsi also has a private legal practice focused on mediation and helping people share housing, cars, land, and other commodities. We talked to Orsi about the legal gray areas that social entrepreneurs can find themselves in, and what SELC is doing about them.

Leftovers

• UK.gov smiles and nods at commentards

  More than 9,500 comments were published on the Programme for Government website, which was launched on 20 May, days after the formation of the coalition.

  Whitehall departments published their responses late last week to no fanfare, revealing as they did that not one policy will be changed as a result of the exercise.

• Change is good. But show your work!

  An anonymous bug filer noticed that the Times seemed to have changed a statistic in the online version of a front-page story about where California’s African Americans stood on pot legalization. As first published, the story said blacks made up “only” or “about 6 percent” of the state population; soon after it was posted, the number changed to “less than 10 percent.” There’s “>a full explanation of what happened over at MediaBugs; apparently, the reporter got additional information after the story went live, and it was conflicting information, so reporter and editor together decided to alter the story to reflect the new information.

  There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s good — the story isn’t etched in stone, and if it can be improved, hooray. The only problem is the poor reader, who was reading a story that said one thing at one time, and something different when he returned. The problem isn’t the change; it’s the failure to note it. Showing versions would solve that.

• New online business model will succeed, says Rupert Murdoch

• The Politics of Email: Son of Reagan liberally attacks Apple, Google and Microsoft

  Michael Reagan, the eldest son of former US President Ronald Reagan, has accused people who use email services from Apple, AOL, Google, Hotmail and Yahoo! of “supporting the Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda” and ultimately “hurting our country”.

• No Wonder it Sold for a Dollar

  Newsweek is running an amazingly bad story today titled “Taliban Seeks Vengeance in Wake of WikiLeaks”. Granted, I have my own beef with Julian Assange but how can an editor let that article go out when the author admits there is no known correlation or causation…

• Why we can’t ditch 3D glasses just yet

  This is the first in a series of blogs based on a seminar given at the BBC by Buzz Hays, chief instructor for the Sony 3D Technology Center in Culver City, California – where they teach the professionals how to make better 3D. The series starts with an answer to the most common complaint about 3D.

• The Ghosts of World War II’s Past (20 photos)

• Environment/Wildlife

  • Fires still spreading in parched Russia

    Russia is mobilising more forces to fight hundreds of wildfires still raging across a vast area east and south of Moscow amid a record heatwave.

  • Rand Paul: Mine safety regulations aren’t needed since “no one will apply” for jobs at dangerous mines

    In April, two miners were killed at the Dotiki Mine in Western Kentucky after the mine’s roof collapsed. The non-union mine had been cited for 840 safety violations by federal inspectors since 2009, and the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing issued 31 orders to close sections of the mine or to shut down equipment during the same period. But when asked about the incident, Kentucky’s Republican Senate candidate, Rand Paul, said “maybe sometimes accidents happen.”

• Finance

  • Why not Elizabeth Warren?

    Whether Elizabeth Warren heads the nascent Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has become the first pitched battle in how the recently passed financial reform laws are put into practice. If the episode so far is any indicator, the battle between interests and reformers is far from over.

    Detractors say that Warren lacks experience, that she’s not impartial, and that she could make it so expensive to extend credit that only the richest Americans and biggest businesses could get a mortgage, a credit card, or a loan. But these knocks against Warren obscure the likely impact that she would have on the bureau. And mostly, they are straw men.

  • Why We Really Shouldn’t Keep the Bush Tax Cut for the Wealthy

    From a strictly economic standpoint — as if economics had anything to do with this — it makes sense to preserve the Bush tax cuts at least through 2011 for the middle class. There’s no way consumers — who comprise 70 percent of the economy — will start buying again if their federal income taxes rise while they’re still struggling to repay their debts, they can’t borrow more, can no longer use their homes as ATMs, and they’re worried about keeping their jobs.

  • Geithner defends Obama policy on tax cut extension

    Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday it would be “deeply irresponsible” for the Obama administration to support a wholesale extension of Bush era tax cuts, including breaks for the wealthy.

    Geithner said in a nationally broadcast interview that President Barack Obama strongly believes those reductions should be retained for the “95 percent” of taxpayers with individual incomes under $200,000 a year and families below $250,000.

  • Geithner tells bankers not to fear new financial regulations

    Timothy F. Geithner, traveling salesman, swept through Manhattan on Monday making a pitch to skeptical bankers, business leaders and even the mayor.

    His central message: Far-reaching financial regulations signed into law by President Obama last month aren’t something to fear. Rather, they are the foundation of a stronger economy for the months and years ahead.

  • In devising punishments, SEC faced with competing interests

    What’s $75 million?

    For Citigroup, it’s a week of profits, less than 0.1 percent of its market value, a rounding error on a balance sheet worth more than $2 trillion.

  • Countrywide settlement pays fraction to investors

    Former shareholders of fallen mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Corp. are in line to recoup a fraction of their investments now that a Los Angeles judge has approved a settlement worth more than $600 million settlement.

    The payoff doesn’t come close to compensating for the money lost by investors. But it could prompt more lenders to settle legal disputes at the center of the housing bust.

  • 99 Weeks Later, Jobless Have Only Desperation

    Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Julian Assange Responds to Increasing US Government Attacks on WikiLeaks

    It’s been ten days since the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published the massive archive of classified military records about the war in Afghanistan, but the fallout in Washington and beyond is far from over. Justice Department lawyers are reportedly exploring whether WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange could be charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing the classified Afghan war documents. Meanwhile, investigators in the Army’s criminal division have reported

  • Secretive group seeks recruits, finds skepticism

    A secretive volunteer group that tries to track terrorists and criminals on the Internet went to the Defcon hacker conference this past week in hopes of recruiting information security experts, but it will first have to overcome some skepticism.

    That’s because most information security professionals have never heard of the group, called Project Vigilant. The group’s director, Chet Uber, came forward Sunday at a press conference run by Defcon organizers to try to recruit volunteers from among the show’s attendees. “We need more people,” he said. “By increasing the numbers, we increase the likelihood that we will get the work done.”

• Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

  • No, The Fifth Amendment Does Not Complicate Net Neutrality

    Lyons then tries to twist this into a claim that it’s like an easement on physical property. Again, this is simply untrue. The third parties are not proactively going onto anyone’s network. They have set themselves up and connected directly to the open internet (via their own ISPs to which they pay handsomely for bandwidth) and the only times their content crosses those other networks is when the end users (i.e., the customers of these ISPs) reach out and request that the content be sent to their computer. That’s how the open internet works. If the ISPs don’t like it, they shouldn’t have offered an internet service. To twist this and claim that the internet is somehow a “private network” of these ISPs and service providers who connect to the open internet are somehow “invading” that private network is the height of sophistry.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • FBI claims no-one may publish its seal

    The FBI ordered wikipedia to remove its seal from the article there about the bureau. It threatened to litigate. Unfortunately for the FBI, the law it cited is the one that forbids making counterfeit badges, and Wikimedia’s lawyers mocked them in its response.

    John Schwartz in the NYT: “Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal. Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. ‘While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version’ that the F.B.I. had provided.”

  • Wikipedia and FBI in logo use row

    A row has broken out between Wikipedia and the FBI over the use of its seal.

  • Copyrights

    • Pirate Bay Founder Appeals “Political Gagging” Court Order

      Early 2010, a Swedish court banned Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from operating the site. Last month, the site’s former spokesperson Peter Sunde was also banned and faces a heavy fine for non-compliance. He has now appealed that decision, with his lawyer describing the court ruling as “political gagging”.

    • Digital Economy (UK)

      • Hadopi’s secret 3-strikes security spec leaked

        Government certified security software: the French government’s Hadopi wants to spy on everything on your computer, every time you log on, otherwise you cannot defend yourself against breach of copyright allegations. How far does this breach our right to privacy or freedom of expression?

        [...]

        Although the consultation is supposed to be public, the details of the specification that Hadopi is requiring were kept secret. The leak is significant because it reveals a proposal for surveillance on Internet users’ own computers.