• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

LinuxCon Analysts: Linux Is Winning

Linux is now in the mainstream of enterprise adoption, according to analysts presenting new research here at the LinuxCon conference.

Did Open Source Need Linux To Hit the Mainstream?

Open source has officially “crossed the chasm from early adoption to mainstream adoption,” pronounced Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forrester Research, at this week’s LinuxCon conference. According to ZDNet’s Paula Rooney, Hammond based his pronouncement on analysis of several studies, most of which have to do with Linux. Is Linux really the best barometer for this kind of announcement, though? Didn’t open source hit the mainstream without it?

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • The Updated XGI Open-Source Graphics Driver Released

    Even the nearly-defunct XGI Technology Inc is able to produce open-source graphics driver code for Linux while VIA continues on with their Linux mess, even with XGI developers working from Windows. In preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari and this month’s release of X Server 1.9, a new release of the XGI DDX driver has been made available.

  • PhysX SDK Support Comes Back To Linux

    Back in 2006 a start-up company known as AGEIA launched the PhysX PPU, the first Physics Processing Unit (PPU) for offloading physics calculations in games and applications that utilize the PhysX API onto this discrete processor for boosting overall system performance.

  • AMD Releases New Stream SDK For Linux With OpenCL 1.1

    AMD has released a new ATI Stream SDK this morning and, among other improvements, it features OpenCL 1.1 support. The OpenCL 1.1 specification was released by the Khronos Group back in June as the first major update to the Open Computing Language since it’s original draft in 2008.

Applications

• Fotoxx — the Greatest Little Linux Photo Editor You’ve Never Heard Of

  Despite a name that sounds like a wrinkle treatment, this little image editor is lightweight and doesn’t have many dependencies — great for a netbook or other modest machine. And it’s jam-packed with great features. If it’s not already packaged for your distro, you can get it at kornelix.squarespace.com/fotoxx.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Install Updated Light Themes For Maverick 10.10 in Ubuntu 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’

  • Drupal 7 Preview

  • 50 really useful Android tips and tricks

  • Python 3 Object Oriented Programming: Managing objects

• Games

  • id Software Open-Sources ET, RTCW

    id Software has announced from their annual QuakeCon event that they have open-sourced their Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Return To Castle Wolfenstein games under the GNU GPL. id Software is known for open-sourcing their games and engines after some years of use and this day has finally come for these two very popular Wolfenstein titles.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s Australian Road Tour 2010 unlocks the value of cloud computing

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, will host a series of briefing sessions across Australia based on cutting through market hype to reveal the true value of cloud computing for businesses.

    The free, half-day business seminars sponsored by IBM will address why cloud computing is one of the most significant shifts in information technology to occur in decades, as well as why it offers local organisations a very real opportunity to thrive in the current economic climate. The sessions will also unveil how open source tools and services can unlock the potential for cloud computing, as well as covering:

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks

  • Two Reasons Rwandan Children Don’t Take XO Laptops Home

    Both of these reasons can be traced back to local culture. Where teachers and administrators are personally responsible for school items, they’ll be very reluctant to have children take computers home. And where children are essential workers in family life, there is little time to “goof off” with an XO.

Open source’s ardent admirers take but don’t give

Interestingly, these two developers sparred over this very issue at LinuxCon in Boston, Massachusetts, this past week, as The Reg reported. Google has come under fire for allegedly forking the Linux kernel with its Android project, for failing to contribute Android changes to the mainline Linux code thereby setting up itself, and the wider Linux community, for prolonged inefficiencies and incompatibilities between the two.

Project Harmony Takes Aim at Open Source Contribution Agreements

Open source licenses help to define the terms and conditions of software use and redistribution. But what are the terms and condition under which developers actually contribute code? That’s the realm of software contribution agreements.

A new effort spearheaded by Amanda Brock, general counsel at Canonical, the lead sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, is trying to help solve the problem of contribution agreements. The effort is called Project Harmony, and it’s a multi-stakeholder project that aims to help provide some clarity and uniformity to software contribution agreements.

VMware: Using Alfresco to Attack Microsoft SharePoint?

Not by coincidence, open source community members have been creating integrations between Alfresco and Zimbra. As a result, the Alfresco-Zimbra combination could give VMware a one-two punch against Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange, The VAR Guy believes.

Open Source Business Intelligence Software Ranked by Analysts

Gluster Brings Open Source to Unstructured Data

Gluster is an open source startup that most people in storage have never heard of. Yet its value proposition could spell trouble for the big boys and potentially send the prices of proprietary hardware crashing down.

Open source already used in 80% of corporates

A great success story for Linux is the London Stock Exchange, which is moving its trading platform onto it. The company bought an entire software firm that developed the Linux based system to make sure it had the developlment resources.

Databases

• Sun, IBM and MySQL Storage Engine Chicanery

  A while back I was doing some research for a client and came across an apparent GPL slight of hand engineered by Sun and IBM. Time constraints and competing priorities kept me from writing about this until now, and Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has taken Sun off of the hot seat (see in particular paragraph 2, Non Assertion), but it’s still a pretty juicy story. What’s more, I think it’s healthy to expose vendor behaviors that cut against the spirit of open source, creating unfair advantages for a privileged few at the expense of everyone else.

  If you’re not familiar with the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is at the heart of this article, you can get a quick and relevant primer here.

Business

• StatusNet’s Evan Prodromou on Facebook, Twitter & more

  LU&D: How do we get users to care about who owns their data?

  EP: I think that’s a really difficult sell. It’s boring and pedantic. Compared against the fun that social networking services provide, talking about privacy issues is really a downer. Who wants to worry about obscure marketing issues when there are friends-of-a-friend to send flirty private messages to?

  It’s much more likely that change comes from another direction. There are entities that simply cannot accept turning over their data and online presence to a third party: governments, political parties, corporations. As these organisations become more engaged with social networking, and want to get more engaged with each other, they’ll insist on a federated approach that gives them full control of their data and presence.

• Semi-Open Source

  • The Organic Source Movement?

    It is when an “open core” company claims it is an “open source company” that some become vexed. They feel that an open source company shouldn’t be owning and closing their code, even if they have a large part of it under an open source licence. The “open core” vendors respond by saying they are catering to customer demand for their closed extensions and that this is their route for monetising the open source code. There are numerous points of view on the issues and an active debate.

Project Releases

• cURL 7.21.1 – New version released!

  Having spent a considerable time within the command line environment, I consider myself reasonably competent with completing the tasks I require with script. Over the years of these small projects, two programs stick out that are essential to many of my life simplifying BASH scripts. The first one would be dialog, which can spruce up even the most mundane script tasks, the other being cURL.

Openness/Sharing

• Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s

  In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain.

  [...]

  Companies as well as academic researchers are using the data. There have been more than 3,200 downloads of the entire massive data set and almost a million downloads of the data sets containing images from brain scans.

• Open Hardware

  • Open Source Wheelchair Design Aids Disabled in Developing Nations

    The wheelchairs sport design features unique to the needs of riders who must regularly get around on rough terrain. The rear wheels are made of bicycle tires that can easily be repaired or replaced, and the front wheels are specifically designed to not sink into sand, soil, or loose pavement. WWI also makes sure riders are well-equipped to service their own wheelchairs — each one ships with a tire repair kit, pump, and detailed user manual.

Programming

• Carahsoft Adds Zend PHP Solutions to Its GSA Schedule–Now Provides Complete PHP Stack for Web Application Development and Management in the Government Sector

Probe of Bribery at H-P Heats Up

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked Hewlett-Packard Co. to provide a trove of internal records as part of an international investigation into allegations that H-P executives paid bribes in Russia, according to people familiar with the investigations.

German prosecutors, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal in April, are looking into the possibility that H-P executives paid about €8 million ($10.9 million) in bribes to win a €35 million contract under which the U.S. company sold computer gear, through a German subsidiary, to the office of the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation. The German probe has been joined by U.S. and Russian authorities, according to people familiar with the matter.

Flattr Opens Beta of Its Micropayment Platform

Flatter was founded by Peter Sunde, the former spokesman for Pirate Bay, a file-sharing site that the entertainment industry is trying to shut down, and one of four people being prosecuted in Sweden for their involvement with the site.

Journalism Warning Labels

It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there’s no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.

Health

• CMD Calls For Federal Investigation of Health Insurers

  Judy Dugan, research director of Consumer Watchdog, said, “Insurance companies appear to be making sure that when new federal rules for spending on health care kick in next year, they can keep their administrative bloat and profits intact.” Wendell Potter, who co-signed the letter, said that red flags went up when Cigna showed a startling drop of 6.4% in its medical spending radio (also called a Medical Loss Ratio, or MLR) to 78.8%, a cut that appears unprecedented for a large insurer. You can read the entire letter to Kathleen Sebelius here (pdf).

• Executives at health insurance giants cash in as firms plan fee hikes

  The top executives at the nation’s five largest for-profit health insurance companies pulled in nearly $200 million in compensation last year — while their businesses prepared to hit ratepayers with double-digit premium increases, according to a new analysis conducted by healthcare activists.

  The leaders of Cigna Corp., Humana Inc., UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint Inc. each in effect received raises in 2009, the report concluded, based on an analysis of company reports filed with the Security and Exchange Commission.

Security/Aggression

• DNA fingerprinting techniques ‘can sometimes give the wrong results’

  DNA evidence is not an infallible tool for criminal investigations, experts have warned.

  Interpretation of samples can be highly subjective and prone to error, a study has found.

• Volunteers needed to man CCTV in Malmesbury

  Volunteers are needed to man a CCTV project in Malmesbury.

  The town council and Malmesbury & Villages Community Partnership (M&VCAP) are working on the project aimed at improving safety in the town.

• Scanners at airports are manned by mature, experienced, responsible, highly trained professionals, remember!?

  Here’s a further example. A member of staff responsible for carrying out screening at Heathrow Terminal 5 has been accused of stealing from a passenger during the screening process.

• Video: The moment Medway’s CCTV car is caught on camera

  He is heard saying: “Do not take my photograph, you haven’t got my permission to take my photograph.”

  Mr Khan responds: “But this is public.”

  The operator replies: “No, it’s not, cause you are not allowed to take my photograph like I’m not allowed to take yours. Why are you doing this, you’re harassing me.”

  He then says he is going to phone the police and can be seen dialling a number before Mr Khan wanders off.

• Health warnings on mobile phones..?

  What is it this time, you ask? San Francisco has become the first city in the US to mandate the posting of radiation emission information beside every single phone that is for sale in every single mobile phone shop in San Francisco. Obviously, the mobile phone lobby is fuming over this mandate, but the local government “health experts” are thrilled, even though mobile phone radiation emission research has proved inconclusive over the years.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• T-Boone Pickens and the Truth about All that Drilling

  The home page of T. Boone Pickens’ “Pickens Plan” is emblematic of the oil industry’s aggressive push to drill for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale basin. The page greets visitors with the blaring headline, “WE MUST BREAK AMERICA’S ADDICTION TO FOREIGN OIL. The Pickens Plan will do it, but we need your help.”

• Peak oil is the villain governments need

  Could peak oil lever politicians out from between the rock of the electorate and the hard place that is climate change mitigation? As Daniel Gros wrote in the Guardian: “the climate-change bill, for which President Barack Obama had pushed so hard, will not even be presented to the US Senate, because it stands no chance of passage”. His analysis ends with a fatalistic statement: “Determined action at the global level will become possible only when climate change is no longer some scientific prediction, but a reality that people feel … A world incapable of preventing climate change will have to live with it.”

• Jellyfish sting hundreds on Costa Blanca beaches

  A vast flotilla of small, almost undetectable jellyfish have stung hundreds of people on Spanish beaches this week – an event swimmer’s nightmare biologists say will become increasingly common due to climate change and overfishing.

Finance

• For-Profit Colleges: Undercover Testing Finds Colleges Encouraged Fraud and Engaged in Deceptive and Questionable Marketing Practices

  Enrollment in for-profit colleges has grown from about 365,000 students to almost 1.8 million in the last several years. These colleges offer degrees and certifications in programs ranging from business administration to cosmetology. In 2009, students at for-profit colleges received more than $4 billion in Pell Grants and more than $20 billion in federal loans provided by the Department of Education (Education). GAO was asked to 1) conduct undercover testing to determine if for-profit colleges’ representatives engaged in fraudulent, deceptive, or otherwise questionable marketing practices, and 2) compare the tuitions of the for-profit colleges tested with those of other colleges in the same geographic region. To conduct this investigation, GAO investigators posing as prospective students applied for admissions at 15 for-profit colleges in 6 states and Washington, D.C.. The colleges were selected based on several factors, including those that the Department of Education reported received 89 percent or more of their revenue from federal student aid. GAO also entered information on four fictitious prospective students into education search Web sites to determine what type of follow-up contact resulted from an inquiry. GAO compared tuition for the 15 for-profit colleges tested with tuition for the same programs at other colleges located in the same geographic areas. Results of the undercover tests and tuition comparisons cannot be projected to all for-profit colleges.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Progressives Up In Arms Over Brand Obama’s Insult

  A year and a half after his November 4, 2008 election, the progressive left is, rightfully, up in arms over the lack of integrity President Barack Obama has shown across the gamut of burning contemporary political issues. These include, but are not limited to issues such as war, health care, secrecy, warrantless wiretapping, and environmental issues, among many others.

  A healthy and flourishing representative democracy depends on an engaged citizenry standing up and demanding that their representatives represent them. President Obama said so himself at this year’s Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas in his desperate plea to show progressive activists that he is, indeed “one of them.”

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Telecom Complaints Commissioner Remains a Relative Unknown

  Notwithstanding the public interest, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services toils in relative anonymity. Established in 2007, the CCTS came as part of a deregulation bargain initiated by then-Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, who deregulated many local telephone markets and established an industry-funded telecom complaints commissioner.

• India threatens to suspend Blackberry by 31 August

  India has given Blackberry phone maker RIM a deadline of 31 August to give the government access to all of its services or face being shut down.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• T-Mobile Sued For Offering Limited ‘Unlimited’ Service

  Parts of the suit are melodramatic for effect, lawyers arguing that the surprise limit makes smartphones “essentially useless for anything other than making or receiving phone calls and text messages.” T-Mobile’s current 10 GB cap is rather generous, and last we checked, unlike some other carriers, T-Mobile only throttles users who cross it — they don’t impose unreasonable overages or boot users from the network.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • How to extract money for using copyrighted performances

    The article also fails to note that there has been criticism of how the royalty administering organizations distribute the money and account for what they do, as is clear from the Wikipedia article on ASCAP link here. Instead it is an account of how one of BMI’s enforcer’s is really very nice and works hard to deal pleasantly but firmly with the poor bar owners and other small businesspeople that use music to attract customers.

  • The copyright cops

    Sound confusing? That’s because it is. Copyright law has evolved largely as a response by governments to the demands of powerful media and content industries. As new forms of recorded media have been invented, legislators have created new spheres of copyright to fence off that intellectual property from perceived threats to the earnings of artists and corporations.

• Distributions

32 bit vs 64 bit Linux – Which to Choose?

For the average desktop user the applications issue, especially with flash – something most of us use everyday, is the driving factor to use a 32 bit version of your Linux distro of choice. If you are using your system as more of a work station (compiling and decoding) then maybe the 64 bit version is a better selection for your needs.

Linux is Political!

People have a hard time understanding that there is no single company behind Linux. They don’t understand that Linux cannot be monopolized like Windows or Mac OS because no single entity owns the Linux source code. When these people realize that there is much more to Linux than its technical strengths and weaknesses, then they really understand its potential to change the software industry.

Desktop

• Confessions of a Windows 7 to Ubuntu switcher

  The other night, I got quite the shock. A good friend, who is a Windows enthusiast and IT administrator/consultant, informed me that he had dumped Windows 7 for Ubuntu.

• What Tweaks Could Make Linux Even Better?

  Maybe that’s why it’s been so hard to wrap our brains around the topic of a recent poll on TuxRadar entitled, “What would you change about Linux?”

  At first, Linux Girl’s mind drew a huge blank. Then she read on.

  “If you had the resources, what single thing would you change?” the daring minds behind the site asked. “Would you merge KDE and Gnome? Would you introduce a new package manager? (eek!) Would you find all mentions of ‘Linux’ and replace it with GNU/Linux?”

Kernel Space

• Kernel.org shares some cute e-mails

  “I’ve been using linux for years (since Red Hat 4, i think). But I just thought – after all this time – why is the “kernel” called that? A ”kernel” is just a little, potentially not even viable, grain of vegetative material. Why not call it the “Colonel?” A Colonel is almost a flag officer, with semi-executive capabilities, etc. – altogether cooler that a mere “kernel,” which mostly connotes an unpopped grain of corn. Huh?”

  No, it doesn’t look like Hawley made it up. He was kind enough to shield the writer’s name.

  I’d love for Linus Torvalds to weigh in on that one — as well as this recent blanket e-mail granting Linux the coveted Famous Software Award — one that will be treasured for years.

• Linux kernel report shows continued innovation. 2.6.36 coming soon

  Corbet said that Linux kernel development is maintaining a fast cadence with about 80 days between Linux releases.

• Linux Security, Then and Now

  Linux is inherently not a secure operating system. The reason it’s not secure is because Linux was based on the architectural design of UNIX, and the creators of UNIX didn’t care about security – it was 1969 after all.

  “The first fact to face is that UNIX was not developed with security, in any realistic sense, in mind; this fact alone guarantees a vast number of holes,” Dennis Ritchie wrote in his paper, “On the Security of UNIX” in 1979.

Applications

• Comparing Three Linux RSS Feed Readers

  Bottom Feeder and RSSOwl are two other popular options for Linux feed readers, however neither would run properly on the Ubuntu 64 bit test machine, so they were considered unsuitable for review. If none of the above options meets your needs, one of those two might be what you’re looking for.

• XBMC Camelot – Beautiful, stylish, classy, and fun

  XBMC Camelot is a far cry from its predecessors. There were none of the problems I encountered the last time. Wireless networking worked, the sound was smooth, there were no read/write issues with external devices.

  You have Wireless connectivity, Samba sharing, live streaming. The media center properly identified the native screen resolution and initiated the graphics card. Furthermore, XBMC is fairly lightweight and did not weigh on system resources. Movies played smoothly, without freezes or jitters. Fast and friendly. On top of all that, XBMC ups the ante with even better looks and a more intuitive interface.

  It simply works. That’s the best praise you can have for software, especially home entertainment software, which is designed to be as simple as possible. XBMC is truly plug-and-play.

• 3 Great Linux Radio Apps To Discover Great New Music [Linux]

  These are far from the only radio apps for Linux; you could also, for example, check out Last.fm and the many applications that can stream from it.

  Can you think of any other cool Linux radio applications? As always, please share them in the comments below. Also be sure to suggest cool online radio stations and plans for global domination.

• Chipmunk – Sweet little GTK Last.FM Player

  Last.fm lovers addicted to music streaming service should cancel their therapy and check out the following shiny new application named ‘Chipmunk’.

  Created by Arch Linux user Andy Kluger, who has a self-confessed dependency on Last.fm, the tiny application provides everything a last.fm user could need – it can stream music based on your own scrobbles, that of tags, artist or recommendations, love tracks, ban tracks and scrobble tracks.

• Proprietary

  • [Opera] Opera 10.61 released

• Instructionals/Technical

  • User space memory access from the Linux kernel

  • Cool User File Systems: GlusterFS

  • View HTML Files from the Command Line – Linux

  • Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a Linux kernel component intended to replace the original Open Sound System (OSS) .

  • Firefox bookmarks

  • Nautilus Location Bar in Lucid

  • Fix Network connection icon disappear on top-right panel

  • 10 IPCS Command Examples (With IPC Introduction)

  • How to Allow MySQL Client to Connect to Remote MySQL server

• Games

  • Top 8 Games For ‘Non-Gamers’ in Linux

  • The Battle for Wesnoth 1.8.4

  • Granatier – A Bomberman alternative

Desktop Environments

• At Work with Linux: Linux Mint 9 Gnome and KDE

  For general use I consider Mint 9 Gnome to be the better distribution, especially for getting inside and tinkering about. It’s also better to just stick with the Gnome desktop throughout, even if the Mint 9 Gnome desktop is using the slab-style mintMenu. At least if folks get annoyed with the pretty Mint Gnome menu, they can install the more conventional Gnome menu bar.

  I feel that the Mint 9 Gnome desktop is snappier than Mint 9 KDE in operation. This is purely subjective, and it may be due to the fact that the VirtualBox additions in Mint 9 KDE are not aligned with the latest version of VirtualBox.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • In Search of the Perfect KDE4 Distro – 4 Linux Mint 9?

    This weekend I will be downloading and installing my next KDE4 candidate, which one will it be? Well kids, YOU decide!

  • Two cool KDE Plasmoids

    It’s time to head off to that wonderful land of KDE where the desktop only gets better and better with each release. In fact, a new release should be out now – KDE 4.5 with 1,723 new features and 16.022 bug fixes. I don’t believe the packages have hit the repositories just yet, but they will soon. And when they do, you should make sure you download and install very quickly.

    [...]

    The KDE desktop keeps getting better, and so does its Plasmoids. The two you have been shown here are only a tiny portion of an ever-expanding set of tools available for the KDE desktop.

  • KDE Reaches New Audiences in North America

    KDE software has traditionally been strongest in Europe and South America. With the growth of events such as Camp KDE and many key contributors calling North America home, KDE is increasing its presence in this region.

  • How Much Faster Is Konqueror With WebKit?

    So, there you have it you cannot even compare Konqueror (KHTML) with Konqueror (WebKit). The one with WebKit is way faster. Not only is it faster than KHTML, it is also much faster than Firefox 4.0 Beta 2.

    Of course, there is much more to a browser that the speed of its JavaScript engine. We are not saying Konqueror is a better browser than Firefox; we are only saying it is faster. If you check out the results we got in our previous tests, Konqueror (WebKit) is however not nearly as fast as Opera, Google Chrome and Chromium.

  • Plasma: now comes in tablets

    In Plasma we always tried to avoid this, by having everything as a plugin, so it will be necessary to replace maybe the shell itself and just the components that really have to be changed.

    With Qt 4.7 a new framework ha been introduced: the declarative UI, that permits to do quite fancy stuff in the QML language in a very short time.

  • Stripes wallpaper

    If you haven’t noticed, KDE SC 4.5 comes with a new wallpaper named Stripes. It has replaced the old default_blue that has been our friend since 3.x days (and maybe even earlier, I don’t know).

  • Distribution branding and Stripes

    So, without a further ado, the preview version of a Debian-specific version of the Stripes wallpaper…

Distributions

• Screenshots

  • Backtrack 4 R1 Screenshots

    For those of you that have yet to discover it, Backtrack is a popular Linux security distribution focused on providing a powerful selection of penetration testing tools. It runs mostly as a Live DVD or USB but is suitable for installation. Once in use, this distribution has excellent hardware detection and a low memory footprint, running well on older hardware too. Backtrack brings users over 300 tools to help with various security-related tasks like hacking wireless, exploiting servers, learning about security and much more.

  • Salix OS 13.1.1 Screenshots

    Today users were greeted by the Salix OS 13.1.1 release. Salix OS is based on Slackware and includes Xfce as its desktop environment. This latest release of Salix OS includes several enhancements over its previous release including Lilosetup, a graphical tool for settings up the Lilo bootloader, a few graphical system administration tools have been added, and more. Find a full list of changes in the official release announcement. You can download Salix OS 13.1.1 in 32 or 64 bit versions or buy Salix OS in our cart on CD. Here are some screenshots of Salix OS 13.1.1.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Well, Fedora 14 Will Not Ship On Time

      Jared Smith, the new Fedora Project Leader, announced last night that the decision was made by the Fedora engineering, development, and QA teams that a delay was in order for this release that is codenamed Laughlin. This decision was made as the Fedora 14 Alpha release was not ready and they felt an extra week was needed to get this first test release in order. With the alpha release slipping, the entire release schedule has been pushed back by one week time.

• Debian Family

  • Debian 6.0 on Track for December Release

    After several delays and many months behind schedule, Debian 6.0 appears to be one step closer to release. As of August 6, the testing branch is now frozen except for fixes and translation updates. This puts Final on track to possibly be released by the end of the year.

    Neil McGovern, Debian Release Team manager, wrote in from DebCon10 in New York to announce this milestone for Debian 6.0. Freeze had been delayed until Python 2.6 migration and updating Glibc was completed. Now only critical bug fixes, documentation changes, and translation updates will be accepted into the Testing branch as a general rule. This will give developers the opportunity to polish 6.0 for final release. The last two major versions have seen a four month stabilization period before final release, allowing estimates that 6.0 will arrive sometime in December.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Feature Freeze in place for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

      The Feature Freeze is now in effect for Maverick. The focus from here until release is on fixing bugs and polishing.

      If you believe that a new package, a new upstream version of a package, or a new feature is needed for the release and will not introduce more problems than it fixes, please follow the Freeze Exception Process by filing bugs and subscribing ubuntu-release.

    • Why this Linux veteran runs Ubuntu

      I keep hearing Ubuntu described as merely a noob’s distro lately. However, Ubuntu has around 50% of the Linux desktop market share, give or take, but Linux as a whole has only gained a tenth of a percent or so since Ubuntu’s introduction. So either noobs adopted Ubuntu in such numbers that half of Linux veterans switched to Windows in protest, or there are quite a few veterans out there running Ubuntu, but who apparently don’t think it’s cool to admit it.

    • Talking about Ubuntu Studio with Scott Lavender, Project Lead for Ubuntu Studio

      SL: I would like to see Ubuntu Studio accomplish at least two things in the next 3 to 5 year; develop an active and supporting community around it and to identify and explore the possibility of cultivating additional user bases.

      KDE has a rich and vibrant community, something similar is what I would like Ubuntu Studio to develop. This would be characterised by significant and frequent user suggestions and feedback, user contributions of art and music to be include in the releases and web site, and user testing of ISO images and bug fixes. Already users routinely report bugs, for which I am grateful.

Events

• LinuxCon Day 2: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: Linux has Arrived.

  As a society, we are all about numbers — How much, how far, how fast. In IT, it is all a numbers game. Teraflops to compare computing power, TPC results to compare databases, analyst numbers to compare penetration — We are all about the numbers. And as a wise man once said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And after sitting through not one but two presentations about the numbers, I am more convinced than ever that numbers are best left to the accountants.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 a big deal

    The impending final release of Firefox 4 is something of a big deal for the Mozilla Foundation. Over the past year the popular open source browser has been facing some stiff competition from the likes of Google’s Chrome and, even, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

    Around a year ago Firefox hit a peak in its popularity with almost 25% market share, something that was achieved in the space of just a few years. Since then its popularity has remained largely static, even dropping slightly in the last few months.

  • Mozilla Looks Ahead to More Secure Firefox

    Additionally, the Firefox team continues to grapple with what Stamm described as “social-technical security” issues, those scams that rely on persuading a user to share personal information or take an action that navigates to a malicious site.

Government

• DNC uses open-source software to ease voter registration

  The Democratic National Committee launched a new website Thursday that showcases the party’s open-source software efforts and offers easy access to voter registration tools for campaigns and state parties.

Science

• Critical plant bank in danger

  Plant scientists around the world are warning that hundreds of years of accumulated agricultural heritage are in danger of being plowed under after a Russian court ruled today (August 11) that the land occupied by a world-renowned plant bank on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg may be transferred to the Russian Housing Development Foundation, which plans to build houses on the site.

• Greed vs. Survival: Which Prevails?

  The global environmental catastrophe that we all face is, of course, a typical tragedy of the (analogue) commons. Resources that are held in common like the atmosphere, or water, or fisheries are exploited for short-term gain by powerful players able to push to the front.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• NASA reports hottest January-July on record, says that 2010 is “likely” to be warmest year on record and July is “What Global Warming Looks Like”

  WMO: “Unprecedented sequence of extreme weather events … matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.”

• “We must learn to want less”

  This was a crucial period for humanity as it was around this time that agriculture began its inexorable spread across Europe and Asia, changing Homo sapiens from hunter-gatherers to farming folk. The consequences were profound and not always beneficial. They also point to future problems for our species, as Wells argues in his latest book, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, published by Allen Lane).

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Verizon and AT&T Ban BitTorrent On Wireless Networks

  A recent Net Neutrality proposal from Google and Verizon has dominated the news this week, with opponents claiming that the deal would kill Net Neutrality on wireless (cellular) networks. What hasn’t been mentioned thus far, however, is that BitTorrent and other types of evil traffic have already been banned for years by Verizon, AT&T and others.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Anti-Piracy Failure Takes Down Creative Commons Videos

    An anti-piracy group has caused a storm of controversy by taking down movies it has no rights to. GVU successfully ordered video hosting site Vimeo to take down several Creative Commons videos created by a freelance journalist and an independent filmmaker. The anti-piracy tracking company hired by GVU claims that its technology failed.