• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

GHCA’s Computer Lab Running Gentoo Linux

As a private school, GHCA would not have been able to afford a typical Microsoft or Apple lab. However, with Linux we were able to get the most modern hardware at the time. Even better yet, that hardware is still more than fast enough even though it is 5 years old, thanks to Linux!

Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 129: Riak

  Riak, a highly scalable, fault tolerant, no SQL database.

  Guests: Mark Philips, Community Manager, and Andy Gross, VP of Engineering of Basho

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • The Linux 2.6.36 Kernel Will Have Some Fun DRM

    Now that the Linux 2.6.35 kernel was released a few days ago, Linus Torvalds has begun pulling in new code for the Linux 2.6.36 kernel as the various developers begin submitting pull requests of their new work. Dave Airlie, the maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code in the Linux kernel, overnight sent in his first Git pull request of his DRM tree. This pull request brings many new features for Intel, ATI, and NVIDIA/Nouveau graphics hardware.

  • AMD Radeon HD 4250 880G On Linux

Applications

• Xiphos: Free Software Bible Study for GNU/Linux and Windows

  Overall, Xiphos has a very user-friendly and simple interface. I found it to be very intuitive and very easy to learn. I was able to completely navigate around the program after only 2 minutes of playing with it. Xiphos has my highest recommendation. I would give it a 9/10 rating:

  * very easy to install.
  * very easy to use.
  * simple user interface.
  * great modular installation system.

  Xiphos was written using the GTK toolkit, and has versions for GNU/Linux, Unix, and Windows. You can download the latest version here: http://xiphos.org/

• LightSpark Vs Flash: Benchmarked

  The team behind open-source Flash alternative LightSpark pushed out a new bug-fix release a few days ago.

  Seeing as we’re a few releases in, I felt now was a prime time to see just how well LightSpark performs against its proprietary counterpart – particularly so I have a benchmark which to compare future releases against.

  Now, you don’t need to be remotely “on-the-ball” to predict that LightSpark won’t out-whoop the real Flash plug-in, but if users are considering taking a performance hit by switching they might want to know exactly how big a hit it will actually be…

• Guitarix – A simple Linux Rock Guitar Amplifier for jack

• Xpad – simple Sticky notes for your desktop

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 4 More Ways to Clean Up Your Ubuntu Machine

  • 8 Not-So-Common Nautilus Hacks and Improvements

  • Add a Grammar Checker to OpenOffice.org using the After the Deadline Extension

  • Install MIB-Ubuntu Plymouth Theme (Based On Mandriva 2010.1) In Ubuntu

  • Record Screen Activity in Ubuntu with RecordMyDesktop

  • Sending Mail through command line on Linux

  • Snort: 5 Steps to Install and Configure Snort on Linux

  • How to add or create swap file on Linux and FreeBSD

  • MOC, a powerful Console based Music Player

  • The Stringceptional Difficulty of Changing Error Messages

  • Deploying a VPN with OpenVPN Service In Gentoo Linux amd64

  • Getting Started With Squid Proxy Server 3.1

  • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.3 (LAMP)

  • Clean djbDNS DNS Server On CentOS – dnscache And tinydns – A To Z

  • Comparing Kernel Dmesgs: Remove Timing Info and Diff Side by Side

• Wine

  • winetricks 20100731 released adds Safari and IE 8 support

  • Wine vs Native Mac 3D Performance Benchmarks

    Scores:
    Counter Strike: Source

    * 1680×1050, Wine – 44.16fps
    * 800×600, Wine – 48.59fps
    * 1680×1050, Native – 54.02fps
    * 800×600, Native – 56.22fps

    Team Fortress 2

    * 1680×1050, Wine – 43.88fps
    * 800×600, Wine – 49.58fps
    * 1680×1050, Native – 50.56fps
    * 800×600, Native – 58.47fps

• Games

  • Makers of Machinarium Having Pirate Amnesty Sale

    Until August 12th, Machinarium (and its soundtrack) will cost only $5. It usually goes for $20. The game is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. In Machinarium you play as an unassuming robot traveling through a beautifully detailed world mechanical malcontents. We grabbed this game from Steam a while back, and can testify to its quality and challenging puzzle-based gameplay.

  • Installing Starcraft II

  • And Yet It Moves For GNU/Linux Released !

    The award-winning puzzle platformer, And Yet It
    Moves, was released for the Linux platform today. Indie studio Broken Rules brings the
    award-winning downloadable PC and Mac game that will have players physically
    rotating environments to overcome various obstacles and challenges to the Free
    Operating System. The game won the 2007 Independent Games Festival Student
    Showcase, was nominated for the 2007 EUROPRIX Top Talent Award and qualified as a
    finalist during IndieCade 2008. Download the DRM-free game as RPM or Debian
    package, or as a Tarball. The game will be on sale for $9.99.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Fifteen Puzzle: Overhauled!

    So that was my first contribution to KDE: a changeable number of pieces, a randomizer, and a color chooser.

  • KDE 4.5 is approaching, thanks to all Kate contributors

    KDE 4.5 will be released in the next days with the most polished Kate/KWrite and KatePart during the KDE 4.x series.

    A lot of work went into fixing bugs and cleaning up old code for this release. Many important aspects where redone, just to enumerate a few:

    * encoding detection & handling
    * the text buffer
    * the undo/redo system (thanks Bernhard)
    * search/replace (thanks again Bernhard)
    * handling cursors and ranges
    * improved spell checking (thanks Michel)
    * improved indentation (thanks Milian)
    * speed improvements (Milian too)
    * better JS scripting (Dominik)
    * porting of KDevelop to new interfaces (David Nolden)

  • Crash statistics for KWin

    The upstream bugs are mostly driver related bugs. The number does not reflect reality perfectly as some driver crashes are set to duplicate. So we see that we have more crashes in drivers than crashes we fixed!

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Shell – Ambiance Theme

    This is a GNOME Shell theme based on the Ubuntu Lucid theme called Ambiance.

Distributions

• Purpose-built: Five specialised Linux distributions

  Tomato Linux

  Kickstart your old router with a little tomato juice. Tomato Linux is a small distro customised to be installed on Broadcom-based routers such as the Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS routers. Once installed Tomato can be administered through a web interface, Telnet or SSH. But more importantly it adds a bunch of new features to your router, including bandwidth monitor, QoS controls, DynamicDNS support, multiple wireless modes as well as the ability to manage the signal strength of the router. And, because it’s essentially an embedded Linux version, there are all manner of extra things you could configure your router to do. It also works like a bomb. I ‘ve been using it on my home router for the past year.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat near Resistance

    Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated resistance at $33.99 with the current price action closing at just $33.25 placing the stock near levels that make it difficult to buy.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Board Meeting, 6 Aug 2010

      Here is an outline of the topics covered:

      * MeeGo Spin status
      * Upcoming FUDcons – Zurich and Tempe
      * Deadline for dealing with open Board tickets
      * fedoracommunity.org domains – how are they going & shall we approve the open requests
      * Community Working Group idea from Rex
      * start.fedoraproject.org
      * Vision for Fedora

    • Fedora 13 update issues

• Debian Family

  • DebConf 10: Day 3

  • Debian Linux on cheap MIPS mini netbook

    Computing-wise, I’ve taken a break from the JamVM/OpenJDK port for a couple of days while I play with my latest toy : a cheap mini-netbook based on a Chinese MIPS clone. It’s branded CnMbook, but it’s available (or was) under dozens of names.

    [...]

    The cost? 65 quid off ebay for an ex-display model as you can’t buy them anymore, the ARM9 WinCE machines having completely replaced them.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04: Dual Boot vs Wubi vs Virtualization

      It can be a big question for some, “to Wubi or not to Wubi” ? So what is Wubi? It is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Do you really want to install Ubuntu inside Windows? Let me list out the pros and cons of using Wubi as well dual booting. and to make things more interesting let us throw in the Virtualization option (Sun VirtualBox or Vmware Player) in the mix. You can then decide whats the best option for you.

    • Finishing up controversial crap week: What Canonical ought to do

      The point is that Canonical has established itself as a big player in the F/OSS world, and to make the F/OSS world better for everyone in it – including Canonical – it’s important that everyone contributes; not just to marketing or UX design or whatever, but to the fundamental engineering. The argument isn’t ‘Canonical doesn’t contribute to $FOO so they’re a bunch of losers, nee ner nee ner!’, it’s ‘Canonical doesn’t contribute to $FOO and it would really be better for everyone if they did’.

    • Desktop Testing Team

      Today, one day after reaching the third Maverick milestone, Alpha 3, I am happy to announce the birth of a new testing project and team in Ubuntu: the Desktop Testing Team.

      Every time we release a new Ubuntu milestone, testers are encouraged to install the new milestone and play around with it, filing bugs as they go. We want to go a bit further and use a more methodological approach for those people that love testing and want to help improving Ubuntu that way.

    • Ubuntu’s vision for its Unity interface

      Ubuntu’s ambitions don’t stop with moving some window buttons and making everything purple – the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium saw the announcement of Unity, a completely new desktop interface aimed at instant-on computing.

      What’s got us really excited is that fact that the creator of the fantastic Gnome Do, David Siegel, is working with the design team. Naturally, we wanted to find out some more…

    • Mark Shuttleworth announces new Ubuntu 10.10 audio feature

    • UNE 10.10 Unity Update Brings New Applets, Lots Of Changes [Screenshots And Video]

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Jolicloud 1.0 “the (free) iPhonesque OS for netbooks” goes live

      • Jolicloud OS Presents a New Way to Organize and Run Your Apps

      • Linux distro Jolicloud: the future of netbooks?

      • Jolicloud 1.0 Review and Screenshots

        Although this release is filled great stuff, the one single thing that caught my eye more than anything is the way cutting edge features have been used to improve the users experience. One I’m concerned about is that it’s built on the older Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope which Canonical will no longer support in October because of its age. Definitely worth trying if you have a Netbook-like device.

      • The State of Ubuntu Studio 2010

        Okay, if you skipped down from the top or you need a refresher about the points I made, here is the Cliff’s Notes version:

        * Several experienced people within the project have left recently and not enough new people have replaced them
        * Many things are not accomplished because of limited resources (i.e. people)
        * Even without prior developer experience you too can contribute to Ubuntu Studio
        * Long term commitment is unnecessary, just fix one thing or a couple
        * If you are not helping then it probably is not getting done

        I believe that about sums it up.

Devices/Embedded

• enTourage eDGe Tablet and e-reader

  I recently stumbled across this interesting device from Entourage Systems. At first glance when closed, the enTourage eDGe may appear to be a typical netbook, but it is actually a combination of an e-reader and a Tablet computer running Android.

• Phones

  • Linux set to dominate mobile market by 2015

    Analyst group ABI Research has predicted that Linux will account for over 62 per cent of the market for non-smartphone mobile devices by 2015. “The number of Linux-oriented initiatives recently seen in the mobile industry indicates that Linux will be a key technology in the next generation of netbooks, media tablets, and other mobile devices,” commented the report’s author Victoria Fodale.

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • N900 Faster Application Manager – Review

      All in all FAM is an excellent application and it is much faster the default application manager. In fact the only real draw back to FAM currently is that it does not support installing applications from the Ovi Store as of yet. Also worth mentioning is that unlike the default application manager FAM supports portrait mode when you tip your device into a vertical position.

    • MeeGo for IVI 1.0 Screenshots

  • Android

    • How Android is turning the smartphone into a commodity and why that’s desirable

      Most smartphone users I know will never turn back to a conventional mobile phone again. They just derive too much productivity from it. It’s hands down the most efficient way to maintain a communications line to your contacts in the smallest form factor possible. Voice calls, texting, emails, instant messaging; they’re all available at your fingers with the right smartphone.

      [...]

      This is a significant step. While previously, cheap mobile devices often meant crappy software loaded inside, with Android, what you’re getting is probably just as good as you can get with any other manufacturer. Sure, you’ll probably be limited by crappy hardware, but the basic features of what I expect of a smartphone will be there. I do not need a top-of-the-line AMOLED or SLCD screen to view my calendar. I do not need a Snapdragon or Hummingbird CPU to check my email. All I need for it is to be decently made and cheap.

• Sub-notebooks

  • OLPC XO Laptop with normal looking keyboard spotted in the wild

    As expected, the folks at OLPC are starting to offer XO Laptop models with more traditional looking keyboards. The new model is called the XO-1.5 HS and it’s aimed at high school students, while the original XO models were designed for younger children.

  • Negroponte: You really can give a kid a laptop

Where would we be without open source software?

Computers without programs are like boat anchors. They are cold, heavy and just sit there like a lump of steel, which of course they are. It is the software which controls the movement of electrons through the computers memory. It is the software which transforms the computer from a cold silent box to a whirring, warm window into a greater world.

Events

• Open source, the demo-meritocracy

  That engagement may be one reason that people were positive and participatory at the recent Apache Lucene EuroCon-our Lucene and Solr user conference in Prague-compared to some of the commercial vendor user conferences we’ve heard about where frustrated users end up yelling at the vendors.

Growth

• Open Source Software Market Growing: Driven by Quality As Well As Cost-Accenture Study

• Open source investment set to grow in 2010

  Open source software may be looking at a bumper year in 2010, as a new survey showed companies are looking to invest.

• The Corporation has gone Open Source

• Open Source Adoption Reaches Tipping Point

  This conclusion backs the findings in this week’s poll of eWEEK Europe UK readers, a clear majority of whom (40 percent) stated that their organisation’s backed, whenever possible, an open source strategy.

  The Accenture survey was of 300 large organisations with annual revenue in excess of $500 million (£315 million) in both the private and public sector.

SaaS

• You Wave “Good-bye” and I Wave “Hello”

  I spent sixteen years of my life working for Digital Equipment Corporation. While that company is now gone, some of its innovations and technologies live on in Intel and ARM processors, and in various parts of different operating systems. If this was not true, I would be very depressed. However, even more technologies (both hardware and software) could have survived if those technologies had been “Open”, and that is what Google is doing.

  So I, for one, encourage Google to keep innovating, and putting those innovations out as FOSS. While some may not become products immediately, many more will be available for discussion and use in other ways that even the Google engineers may not have envisioned.

Databases

• Oracle’s Next MySQL Move: Sept. 19 at Oracle OpenWorld

  When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems — and by association, MySQL — plenty of open source pundits expressed concern. After much silence there are at least two signs Oracle plans to show MySQL customers and partners some love. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Oracle

• Illumos Makes OpenSolaris Board Threat Moot

  On August 3 Nexenta hosted a conference call to announce a new open source project called “Illumos.” Illumos is an open source alternative to a critical part of the OpenSolaris distribution free from the binds of Oracle. Still several days short of the deadline set by the OpenSolaris governing board to Oracle, perhaps this announcement makes it all moot.

  The effort is headed up by former Sun and Oracle Solaris developer Garrett D’Amore. He said that Illumos is not a fork of OpenSolaris, but more of a code base that perhaps Nexenta, Belenix, and SchilliX can be built on one day. Most important to D’Amore and Illumos supporters is that the code base will live on and be free from the control of any corporate entity.

  [...]

  With the days counting down to the probable disbanding of the board and the constant threat of losing access to the source, Illumos might be all that remains of OpenSolaris sooner or later. Several distributions are based on OpenSolaris now, and its loss could have spelled disaster for those systems. That’s why most of them as well as several current and former OpenSolaris developers have committed to Illumos. Other community partners include Joyent, berliOS, Greenviolet, and Everycity.

CMS

• Drupal 7: Everything you need to know

  The most notable improvement to Drupal’s user interface are overlays. Usability lab tests observed that many users coming from other CMS systems were accustomed to a dedicated back end for administration and content creation, and found it difficult to distinguish the administration layer from the rest of the website.

• Drupal 7 release date mooted

  The final line-up has been announced for DrupalCon Copenhagen, this year’s annual European gathering for fans and developers of the popular open source content management system. Running from 23-27 August, alongside the usual ‘State of Drupal’ address from project founder Dries Buytaert, keynote speakers include Rasmus Lerdorf, author of the original PHP scripting language, and HTML5 expert Jeremy Keith.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Eben Moglen’s LibrePlanet 2010 Keynote on the State of Free Software and the Future

  Eben Mogen of the Software Freedom Law Center recently gave the keynote address at the LibrePlanet conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Liquidware Announces Open Source Scientific Calculator and Computing Platform

    With the growing popularity of Open Source Hardware, Liquidware announces the first 100% Open Source Hardware and Open Source Software Scientific Calculator. Based on Linux, Arduino, and the BeagleBoard design specifications, the Open SciCal X101 brings modularity and customization handheld scientific calculators and research aids.

Programming

• I hate Git

  I hate git. I really do. The people who designed the plumbing never stopped to think how any of it would be used, and the user interface is a bunch of ad-hoc bolted on independent bits that have nothing to do with each other.

Favorite computer myths

Security/Aggression

• Media’s response to the Hacker != Cracker open letter

  Today I am happy to report that this action had a bigger impact that we hoped for!

  * Delo — probably the most serious Slovenian daily newspaper was very keen on publishing our open letter in the readers’ letters section in the printed edition.
  * Dnevnik — the other major daily newspaper has also published the open letter under readers’ letters in both the printed form and online.

  [...]

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Masters: “The Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 continues…. Thousands of deaths, severe fires, and the threat of radioactive contamination”

  In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. And they were only looking at a 720 ppm case! The Dust Bowl was a sustained decrease in soil moisture of about 15% (”which is calculated by subtracting evaporation from precipitation”).

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• The EFF SSL Observatory

  The EFF has put up a new page for a project which it calls the SSL observatory. They have spent months collecting information about SSL certificates across the net; as one might expect, they have found some interesting things.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Internet traffic talks collapse

  Regulators halted closed-door negotiations about net neutrality rules with phone, cable and Internet companies on Thursday after reports of a side deal between two participants, Verizon Communications Inc and Google Inc, surfaced.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • SA copyright laws outdated and in need of urgent overhaul, says new study

    The ACA2K project has been examining the relationship between copyright and access to learning materials in Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, Egypt and South Africa. The project, which began in 2008, is supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and South Africa’s Shuttleworth Foundation, and managed by the Wits University LINK Centre in Johannesburg.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux big in SA

Windows may still be the dominant operating system but in South Africa Linux has a good showing

We all know that Windows is the dominant operating system, around the world. But how popular is Linux?

According to analysts StatCounter, Linux is still minuscule in comparison with the Windows family of operating systems but there are some numbers worth looking at.

A Tiny Little Program

He sent me back the Windows executable. And here is the directory listing of the Linux and Windows executables:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 brad brad 7514 2010-07-27 10:07 fixfile
-rw-r–r– 1 brad brad 163954 2010-08-04 07:17 fixfile.exe

It’s a 45-line C program with only two functions. It compiles to about 7 1/2 kbytes on Linux. And it compiles to almost 164 kbytes on Windows!

Easing the Differences Between Unix and Linux

Recently a friend of mine needed to convert a lot of videos from AVI format to Windows Media for a client. My friend is also of the Microsoft persuasion, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money acquiring batch conversion software.

I recommended that he get a copy of Ubuntu, load it up with some video codecs and editing software, then use ffmpeg (with the handy WinFF GUI) to batch convert the files. This is how I usually do the job, and I have had great success with Ubuntu and openSUSE in finding and installing the right software and having this particular task Just Work.

Kernel Space

• Realtime Linux: academia v. reality

  The 20th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS2010) was held in Brussels, Belgium from July 6-9, along with a series of satellite workshops which took place on July 6. One of those satellite workshops was OSPERT 2010 – the Sixth International Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time Applications, which was co-chaired by kernel developer Peter Zijlstra and Stefan M. Petters from the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal. Peter and Stefan invited researchers and practitioners from both industry and the Linux kernel developer community. I participated for the second year and tried, with Peter, to nurse the discussion between the academic and real worlds which started last year at OSPERT in Dublin.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Tips to install Ubuntu on Windows

  • Install VLC 1.1.2 in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)

  • Build a Linux Media Center PC

    Even so, choosing Linux offers a number of advantages. In this article, we’re going to show you how to build a Linux-based media center that acts as a music, video, and photo server for your entire house. It will display video on a large-screen TV without a hitch. Most importantly, coupled with MythTV, the system will record TV shows and act as a genuine DVR. This last point is key, because many so-called “media center” setups don’t actually do this, and just exist to play standalone media files or stream video from the Web.

  • Keeping track of your PCs temperature in Linux

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Cloud Linux Inc. Goes Global as 16 New Hosting and Data Center Partners Come Online

  • Tech Certifications Are Worthy Again

    “Red Hat is doing very well and is taking advantage of open systems business demand,” said Foote in an interview with eWEEK. “Two Red Hat certs are in the top 10 on our IT Certifications Hotlist: Red Hat Certified Technician and Red Hat Certified Security Specialist. It appears that companies still want a support base, even in open systems where you don’t have to choose a vendor. But they are, and those investing in the cloud are looking at employee skill sets in Linux and open source.”

• Debian Family

  • Debian Squeeze frozen

    During DebConf10, currently being held in New York, the Debian developers announced that Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” has been frozen. This means that the ongoing development of the next version of Debian has moved into a new phase where the focus will be on bug-fixing and polishing the distribution ready for release at some point in the future.

  • Debian’s next release frozen

    The Debian GNU/Linux Project has announced that its next release, Squeeze, has been frozen.

    This means that no new features will be added and that work will now commence on ironing out all release-critical bugs so that Squeeze can be officially released.

    The release will be based on the 2.6.32 kernel and will have version 4.4.5 of the KDE Desktop and 2.30 of GNOME. Other desktop environments like XFCE (version 4.6.2) and LXDE (0.5.0) are also included.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Is It Time To Use Ubuntu Server?

      Despite being treated like a stepchild due to the presence of heavyweights like RHEL, CentOS, SLES and the BSD Brothers, Ubuntu Server has consistently improved over the years.

      As of version 10.04, Ubuntu Server 10.04 makes the perfect choice for running your servers in a corporate environment with low to medium loads.

    • Ubuntu Accessibility Project Seeks Help with Survey

      When Ubuntu’s software designers sit down to design software, they prefer to do so with a total picture of the end-user in mind. Their method involves creating “personas,” a compilation of characteristics that represents various types of people who use the software. For instance, Mary might be a first time Linux user who loves working with media files and images, while Chuck may be a FOSS hobbyist who enjoys working at the command line.

    • Open Source Improves Internet Access For Senior, Disabled Netizens

      The new tooling technology simplifies the way Web applications are tested for compliance with current accessibility standards and guidelines, helping to speed up delivery of new accessible Internet applications.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Hands-on: Jolicloud 1.0 makes Web apps equal desktop citizens

        There are a lot of good ideas on display in Jolicloud 1.0, but the nascent product still feels incomplete. If the company behind Jolicloud can expand on the current implementation and fill in some of the gaps, it has the potential to be a real winner. I like where they are taking the user experience and I think that there are a lot of great things that they can do to make the launcher richer if they take full advantage of HTML’s inherent strengths.

        The real challenge will be continuing to expand the scope of Jolicloud’s differentiating features while keeping pace with Ubuntu and ensuring that Jolicloud users will benefit from Ubuntu’s steady stream of new features.

        Some of the technologies that Canonical is developing for Ubuntu’s own Unity environment (particularly the D-Bus-powered messaging indicators and application indicators) could potentially make it much easier for third parties like Jolicloud to ditch the conventional GNOME panel and integrate the underlying functionality into their own custom user experience in a more seamless way. It would be great to see the functionality of Ubuntu’s messaging indicators, for example, woven seamlessly into the Jolicloud launcher.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-ready SoC brings VoIP to optical end-points

  Mindspeed announced a new member of its Comcerto family of VoIP system-on-chips (SoCs), targeting media, signaling and control processing on low-to-medium density optical networking environments. The Comcerto 300xv offers dual ARM11 processors, a 64-bit DSP, dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and a PCI Host controller, and is available with an OpenWRT Linux-based evaluation board.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Questions for Nokia executive show support

      Several people who are clearly fond of their N900 phones expressed their dismay at feeling abandoned. The N900 runs Maemo, an operating system Nokia developed based on Debian Linux. Earlier this year Nokia said it would merge Maemo with Moblin, an open-source operating system that Intel developed.

  • Android

    • Android Phones bring revolution to Mobile Industry

      A lot of Mobile devices come with attractive features and fabulous designs, but when Android based phones get released in the market, everything looks pale and goes down. As if users are waiting for the glimpse of the model that is implemented by Google’s Android software.

    • Netflix: “Would Be Stupid of Us” to Ignore Android’s Continued Growth

      We knew Netflix had plans to bring an app to our beloved platform since the start of the summer (after a job posting uncovered their plans to do just that), but we didn’t get a concrete window. We still don’t have a concrete window, but at least Netflix isn’t keeping quiet. One of the company’s employees stated on Reddit that they would be stupid to ignore the Android userbase considering how much it’s blown up in the first half of the year (More on that here, here, here, here, and here.)

    • Why Android App Security Is Better Than for the iPhone

      On the Linux-based Android platform, each application runs in a separate “silo,” unable by default to read or write data or code to other applications. Associated with each isolated application is a unique identifier and a corresponding set of permissions explicitly governing what that particular application is allowed to access and to do.

      As a result, much the way Linux users typically don’t have “root” privileges with the associated power to do systemwide harm, so Android apps by default are limited in a similar way. Just as Linux minimizes the damage that could be done on the desktop by a virus affecting an individual user, in other words, so Android restricts the potential damage that could be done by a rogue application.

      In order for any data to be shared across Android applications, it must be done explicitly and in a way that informs the user. Specifically, before installation can even happen, the app must declare which of the phone’s capabilities or data it will want to use–the GPS, for example–and the user must explicitly grant permission to do so. Those wallpaper apps, it should be noted, were no exception. So, if a user sees upon installation that a simple wallpaper app is requesting access to her list of contacts, say, there’s probably reason to think twice before proceeding.

      On the iPhone, on the other hand, it’s a different story. All apps are considered equal and can access many resources by default, and without having to tell the user. So, while on Android you’ll be able to see that a malicious app is suspicious the moment you try to install it, on the iPhone iOS, you’ll have no idea–potentially until the harm is done.

    • Vodafone angers HTC Desire owners

      Vodafone has angered customers with HTC Desire mobile phones after delivering an update that added new applications which can’t be deleted.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Acer Debuts Dualboot Android/XP Netbook at $300

    Acer today revealed a dual-boot netbook that offers users the benefits of both Windows XP and Android.

  • Acer prepping netbook running Android and Windows XP

Accenture survey sees open source investment rising

According to survey results released by Accenture, two thirds (69%) of organisations anticipate increased investment in open source, with over a third (28%) saying they expect to migrate mission critical applications to open source within the next twelve months. The survey of three hundred large public and private sector organisations in the US, UK and Ireland, found that half of them said they were fully committed to open source and almost a third said they were still experimenting with open source.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla releases Thunderbird 3.1.2

    The Mozilla developers have released version 3.1.2 of their open source Thunderbird email and news client, code named “Lanikai”. According to the developers, the latest maintenance update addresses several user experience concerns and improves the applications overall stability.

Databases

• MongoDB 1.6 adds auto-sharding and replica sets

  NoSQL document store MongoDB’s new release from 10gen and the MongoDB community now offers automated horizontal scaling, high availability, automatic failover, replica sets and auto-sharding. MongoDB 1.6 is the fourth stable release of the NoSQL database.

Oracle

• NetBeans 6.9.1 provides first fixes and JavaFX update

  According to the release notes for the update a number of usability issues in the JavaFX Composer and Editor have been fixed. A full listing of the patches incorporated is available. NetBeans 6.9.1 is available to download and is dual licensed under the Common Development and Distribution Licence (CDDL) v1.0 and the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

• New OpenOffice.org Writer Extension Produces Braille

Government

• David Cameron hails public’s 100,000 spending cut ideas

  Suggestions include getting cheaper mobile phone contracts across government, and switching government and public service computers to run on free Linux and open source software.

Licensing

• Court orders GPL compliance

  A court in the US has ordered a company not complying with the terms of the GNU General Public Licence ver 2.0 to stop distributing the software which was putting it in non-compliance and awarded damages to the plaintiffs.

  The Software Freedom Conservancy and Erik Anderson, the developer of Busybox, filed the suit against Westinghouse Digital Electronics and 13 others over the distribution of the Busybox utility in HDTV products.

• The GPL Wins Again

  In December 2009, the Software Freedom Conservancy filed lawsuits against 14 consumer electronics vendors alleging that they were not in compliance with the GPL license. Of those 14 vendors, 13 have now either settled amicably or are in productive discussions toward a settlement.

  In one case, consumer electronics vendor Westinghouse failed to comply, and a U.S. District Court has now ruled in a default judgment against it.

• BusyBox takes out bankrupt opponent in GPL lawsuit

  Basically, Westinghouse gets off easy in comparison with those who have shared music on P2P sites ($675,000 and $1.92 million, in the first two cases to go to trial) because it only shipped a single software package, even though it was done for commercial gain.

A tale of two prosecutions: Same facts, different result

Two cases in which DAG has played a prominent advisory role were those of Paul Clarke, who was found guilty of possessing a shotgun which he had handed in to the police (at one point he was facing an automatic five year prison sentence, though thankfully the judge was able to find “exceptional circumstances”) and the ongoing case of Paul Chambers, whose Twitter joke about Nottingham airport led to his conviction for communicating a “bomb hoax”.

In both cases, the letter of the law was used as a pretext for bringing charges despite the lack of any real public interest in doing so. Part of the problem may lie in the narrow way in which “public interest” is defined by the Crown Prosecution Service. CPS guidelines assume that once the evidence is strong enough to suggest a likelihood of conviction, a prosecution will always be in the public interest unless there are “clear” reasons suggesting otherwise. “A prosecution will usually take place unless the prosecutor is sure that there are public interest factors tending against prosecution which outweigh those tending in favour” says the latest edition of the CPS code (pdf). I guess that because they are dealing with criminal cases day in, day out, CPS lawyers easily overlook the devastating effect that prosecution often has on an individual’s life.

Judge trounces Register.com in Baidu.com hijacking case

As a result, Baidu — the world’s number-three search engine and the biggest in China — lost control of the baidu.com domain name for more than five hours. Register.com employees refused assistance when legitimate Baidu representatives appealed for help by phone and online chat, and didn’t begin to address the problem until two hours after first being told of the snafu.

Science

• SpaceX Unveils Heavy-Lift Vehicle Plan

  The U.S. government should lead development of a nuclear thermal propulsion system for a future Mars mission and leave new heavy-lift launchers to commercial entities, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) says.

Security/Aggression

• Defense Department message to Wikileaks

  All this may appear stupid or even funny (“returning electronic documents”) but the communication is a very professional way to deal with classic news agencies, given how they operate. Also the concept of “stolen property” looks pretty compelling from a media communication perspective, though US government documents are generally in the public domain (irrespective of disclosure).

• Experiments in Torture: Physicians group alleges US conducted illegal research on detainees

• Tom Ridge Joins the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s Natural Gas Gold Rush

  Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has, for the most part, been out of the spotlight for the past year since he wrote his book titled The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…And How We Can Be Safe Again, which came out in September of 2009. In that book, Ridge confessed that, although unsurprising to anyone who understood the rampant fear-mongering and propaganda that took place in the post-9/11 Bush era, he was pressured by others in the Bush Administration to purposely manipulate the infamous color-coded National Security Alerts for political reasons, and in particular, during the run-up to former President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Massive ice island 4x size of Manhattan separates from Greenland glacier

  Andreas Muenchow, an oceanographic researcher from the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, reports that an “ice island” four times larger than Manhattan has separated from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland (shown in the photo above from 2009).

• BP oil spill mostly cleaned up, says US

  The US government said today that most of the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico has been cleaned up as BP reported that a “static kill” blocking procedure was stopping more crude pouring into the gulf.

  The White House energy adviser, Carol Browner, said a new assessment had found that about 75% of the oil had been captured, burned off, evaporated or broken down in the Gulf.

• Fossil fuel subsidies are 10 times those of renewables, figures show

  Despite repeated pledges to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and criticism from some quarters that government support for renewable energy technologies is too generous, global subsidies provided to renewable energy and biofuels are dwarfed by those enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry.

• Ecuador signs $3.6bn deal not to exploit oil-rich Amazon reserve

  How much would you pay for the most biologically rich patch of land on Earth – some 675 sq miles of pristine Amazon, home to several barely contacted indigenous tribes, thousands of species of trees and nearly 1bn barrels of crude oil?

  Ecuador, home of the Galapagos Islands, the Andes mountain range and vast tracts of oil-rich rainforest, yesterday asked the world for $3.6bn not to exploit the Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha oil block in the Yasuni national park. A knockdown price, it said, considering the oil alone is worth more than $7bn at today’s prices. The 407m tonnes of CO2 that would be generated by burning it could sell for over $5bn in the global carbon markets.

• Deadly fungus threat to insect-eating US bats

  A North American bat regarded as one of the most voracious insect-eaters in the world faces extinction in parts of the continent within the next 16 years, scientists say.

  The little brown myotis bat is one of the most abundant in the US and Canada, but the population is threatened by a fungus that causes a lethal disease known as white-nose syndrome.

  The fungus, Geomyces destructans, causes a loss of body fat and disrupts the usual hibernation behaviour of the bats, causing them to wake early and leave their roosts during the daytime. In affected areas up to 99% of bats will die out.

• A Real Mess in Orbit: Space Junk to Hang Around Longer Than Expected

  Space junk continues to clutter the friendly cosmic skies, posing threats to satellites and spacecraft, with scientists working to identify which bits of orbital rubbish to pluck from the heavens first. But a new study suggests they’re fighting an uphill battle.

  New research on changes in the Earth’s upper atmosphere suggests space debris could remain in orbit for longer than expected.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• TalkTalk becomes StalkStalk

  A little over 3 weeks ago, an observant UK TalkTalk customer discovered their ISP was stalking their web surfing. (Read more on the Phoenix Broadband forum).

  For a period of approximately two months, TalkTalk have been covertly monitoring the web pages requested by their customers. Then, moments later, replaying exactly the same requests, to obtain the same page content that their customers had been reading for analysis. Even TalkTalk staffers seem surprised that consent was not sought for this process.

• Private browsing modes in four biggest browsers often fail

  Features in the four major browsers designed to cloak users’ browser history often don’t work as billed, according to a research paper that warns that users may get a false sense of security when using the built-in privacy settings.

Intellectual Monopolies

• GM crop escapes into the American wild

  A genetically modified (GM) crop has been found thriving in the wild for the first time in the United States. Transgenic canola is growing freely in parts of North Dakota, researchers told the Ecological Society of America conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, today.

  The scientists behind the discovery say this highlights a lack of proper monitoring and control of GM crops in the United States.

  US farmers have dramatically increased their use of GM crops since the plants were introduced in the early 1990s. Last year, nearly half the world’s transgenic crops were grown in US soil — Brazil, the world’s second heaviest user, grew just 16%. GM crops have broken free from cultivated land in several countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan, but they have not previously been found in uncultivated land in the United States.

  “The extent of the escape is unprecedented,” says Cynthia Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who led the research team that found the canola (Brassica napus, also known as rapeseed).

  Sagers and her team found two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild — one modified to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (glyphosate), and one resistant to Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty herbicide (gluphosinate). They also found some plants that were resistant to both herbicides, showing that the different GM plants had bred to produce a plant with a new trait that did not exist anywhere else.

  [...]

  Sagers agrees that feral populations could have become established after trucks carrying cultivated GM seeds spilled some of their load during transportation. She notes that the frequency and population density of GM canola that they found may be biased as they only sampled along roadsides.

• “Taco Tuesday” out at downtown restaurant due to challenge by Taco John’s chain, but promotion lives on

  Taco John’s — a chain that has seen at least three efforts to expand into Oklahoma fail over the past 25 years — is ordering owners of downtown’s Iguana Mexican Grill to quit using the phrase “Taco Tuesday” to promote its weekly $1 dollar taco nights.

• Copyrights

  • Making A High Quality Film On The Cheap With A Digital SLR

    A few years back at a Cato Institute conference on copyright, a guy from NBC Universal challenged me with the question of “how will we make $200 million movies?” if content is freely shared. As I noted at the time, that’s really the wrong question. No one watching a movie cares about how much the movie costs. They just want to see a good movie. The question for a good filmmaker or producer or a studio should be “how do I make the best movie I can that will still be profitable?” Starting out with a “cost” means that you don’t focus on ways to save money or contain costs. You focus on ways to spend up to those costs. That’s backwards, and it’s how you fail as a business.

  • Marking and Tagging the Public Domain: An Invitation to Comment

    Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.