09.10.10

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• What’s It Like To Be A Linux Journal Blogger?

  Well, first of all, it’s fun, or I wouldn’t be doing it. I work with some intelligent, talented people, like Carlie Fairchild, publisher at LJ, and Katherine Druckman, our Webmistress. My job description as one of the LJ bloggers is to “write about whatever you want, as long as it is Linux related”. That’s pretty much the ideal job description for somebody like me who has been doing Linux full-time since shortly after Slackware first came out in 1993. I feel lucky to be writing for Linux Journal, which is currently celebrating its 16th year of publication, and is the original magazine of the global Linux community.

• Why the Linux Myths Continue

  Smart marketing could make a difference too. Just consider the huge impact that one television ad–the one in 1984 from Apple where the female athlete threw the sledgehammer toward a Borg-like figure resembling Big Blue–had for Apple. For Linux, the myths propogate and continue because there is no unified message designed to challenge the myths, no coordinated spending on such messaging. The myths don’t propogate because of shortcomings in Linux itself.

• Server

  • TurnKey Linux brings speedy, small-scale migration to the cloud

    TurnKey Linux has unveiled a system-level backup and restore system called TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration (TKLBAM) that aims to add a level of flexibility to cloud computing. Powered by the Amazon S3 storage cloud, the system brings speed, smarts, and automation to backups, restores, and migration in the cloud — at least on a limited scale.

• Kernel Space

  • Broadcom makes its Wi-Fi chipsets more Linux friendly

    According to Henry Ptasinski, a principal scientist in the wireless connectivity group at Broadcom, Broadcom has released the source code for the “initial release of a fully-open Linux driver for it’s latest generation of 11n chipsets. The driver, while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211 stack. It supports multiple current chips (BCM4313, BCM43224, BCM43225) as well as providing a framework for supporting additional chips in the future, including mac80211-aware embedded chips.

  • New Linux Benchmarks Of SilverStone’s HDDBOOST

    The purpose of the HDDBOOST is to increase the disk performance by enabling SSD speeds on the host hard drive while reducing write times to the SSD. From our Linux tests in that article we had a hard time getting this small device to provide any measurable performance gains, but in fact it caused some performance losses.

  • The Linux Foundation Announces Program for 2010 End User Summit

    The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the speaker lineup and details for The Linux Foundation End User Summit. The Summit is a unique opportunity for the most advanced enterprise users to collaborate with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest-level maintainers and developers.

  • Invitation-only Linux summit announces speakers

  • Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin Offers Sneak Peek at 2010 End User Summit

  • Linux Foundation details 2010 End User Summit programme

    Confirmed keynote speakers include British Telecom’s Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami, who will be giving a talk entitled “Purple Haze to Purple Rain: Why the Cloud Rocks”, and Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, who will be discussing the next-generation enterprise computing. NASDAQ OMX Vice President Bob Evans will detail what he feels is working today with Linux and what he believes would work in his environment. Other various panels and sessions will cover topics ranging from “What’s next in Linux file systems & Storage”, to virtualisation and tracing.

  • APLcomp Joins The Linux Foundation

    APLcomp is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software vendor that primarily serves the financial services industry. An increasing number of its customers are deploying applications in the cloud and are recognizing the advantages of using an open operating system to support this infrastructure.

  • The Last Barrier to Wireless in Linux Falls

    This advance could be in Ubuntu as early as 10.10 but most others will see it in 2011 as the FLOSS code for the drivers will be merged with Linux 2.6.37. Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze is now up to 2.6.32. We Debianistas may have to build from source for a while yet.

  • Graphics Stack

    • ATI Evergreen 3D Code May Soon Go Into Gallium3D

      AMD finally pushed out open-source 2D/3D acceleration code for Evergreen (a.k.a. the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards) last month, but since then these drivers haven’t received too much attention. AMD’s few open-source developers are beginning to turn their attention to supporting the Radeon HD 6000 series more promptly in the open-source world while the community developers seem to still have their attention on the Gallium3D driver for the ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/R700) hardware.

• Applications

  • Proprietary

    • JetBox 8150 Industrial Communication PC w/ built-in Media Processor for Enhanced Multimedia Display!

      To provide even more advanced functionality, the Linux OS of JetBox 8150 also includes openVPN and openSWAN to enable the VPN function working in Linux as well as cross windows system.

    • Echelon rolls Linux-based smart grid products

      Echelon Corp. rolled out Wednesday (Sept. 8) a Linux-based software environment for smart grid applications and new hardware to run the code. Duke Energy signed a $14.5 million deal to use the new products it expects to start field testing before the end of the year.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Manage Linux Downloads with wget

    • How to Install Linux from ISO to Installed

    • Weekend Project: Open Source Alternatives to Adobe Flash on Linux

  • Games

    • Amnesia: The Dark Descent Now Available For PC, Mac And Linux

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • PyQt comes to OpenSolaris

      For the past month I’ve been honing my PyQt skills and greatly enjoyed it. I’ve been saying to people at conferences — for years already — that Python (or some other scripting language) is the Right Approach ™ to a great many end-user applications for its speed on development and ease of prototyping. Now I finally spent a month testing the truth of that statement.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Interviews from GUADEC, Part 4

      Stormy Peters is the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and when Jeremy Allison from the Google Open Source Programs Office ran into her at GUADEC, he was eager to talk to her about the direction that GNOME is heading. In the video above, Stormy and Jeremy discuss release schedules, GNOME 3, and hackfests. Enjoy!

• Distributions

  • Friday’s security updates

  • Red Hat Family

    • Cloud Linux and Ksplice Launch First Ever Rebootless Linux Distribution for Hosting Service Providers

    • Red Hat Bulls in Charge

  • Debian Family

    • Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Becomes More Interesting

      Since last year we have been talking about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, one of the official ports for Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” that will bring a 32-bit and 64-bit FreeBSD kernel as an option to using the Linux kernel. Debain GNU/kFreeBSD still has the Debian user-land complete with its massive package repository and apt-get support, but the FreeBSD kernel is running underneath instead of Linux. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has matured a lot over the past year and most recently it has switched to using the FreeBSD 8.1 kernel by default and also now supports ZFS file-systems.

      In January of this year was our first time benchmarking Debian GNU/kFreeBSD when it was using the FreeBSD 7.2 kernel. With that initial testing, in 18 of our 27 benchmarks Debian GNU/Linux was still faster than Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. We delivered a much larger comparison a week later when comparing the Debian variant to Fedora, FreeBSD 7.2/8.0, OpenBSD, and OpenSolaris. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD performed about average.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • This week in design – 10 September 2010

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint Releases Debian Edition

        • Edubuntu gets a new installer

          One of our goals for the Maverick development was to enhance our installation process.

          Previously in 10.04 we introduced a way to test LTSP straight from the Live DVD and then install it or the Netbook-Edition interface at the end of the install.

          It worked great but we then received reports from users telling us they didn’t see a way to install either LTSP or the Netbook interface during the install.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Apparent Networks Simplifies VoIP Testing

    Apparent Networks, a provider of network monitoring services delivered via the cloud, has unveiled a new service that makes used of a Linux-based appliance to determine whether an enterprise network can stand up to the rigors of delivering voice over IP (VoIP) services.

  • OK Labs Forging the Mobile Virtualization Movement

  • New E-Readers and Tablets: PocketBook 603, 903, IQ at IFA Berlin

    The 6-inch PocketBook Pro 603 and 9.7-inch 903 are similar models, both running Linux and built around 533MHz processors and 256MB of RAM. Both models have screens with a 4-to-3 aspect ratio and resolutions proportional to their size.

  • Eurotech and Wind River Announce Collaboration to Speed Embedded Application Development

  • Tanner EDA Releases Linux Version of Full-flow Analog IC Design Suite

    Tanner EDA, the driver for innovation in the design, layout and verification of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs), has released a Linux version of the company’s HiPer Silicon full-flow design suite, giving designers a complete analog design flow from schematic capture, circuit simulation, and waveform probing to physical layout and verification.

  • Parrot AR.Drone iPhone-controlled quadrocopter ships September 9th

    The AR Drone boasts sophisticated software, running on an embedded Linux OS on a 468mhz ARM processor, to process and react to in-flight information coming from the 3-axis accelerometer, multiple gyrometers, ultrasound altimeter and the vertical ground-facing camera. The marketing guys at Parrot claim that all this guidance technology means that even a child can fly the AR Drone.

  • Windriver teams with board firms for Linux design platform

    Wind River has teamed up with a group of embedded board suppliers to provide complete development platforms running it VxWorks real-time operating system and/or Wind River Linux.

  • Phones

    • Leaked WebOS 2.0 Shots Show a Bevy of New Features

    • WebOS 2.0 Beta 1 Screenshots emerge, show several new features

      WebOS 2.0 Beta is a new version of Palm webOS which will be released later this year. Palm webOS is Palm’s proprietary mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. The features of the WebOS 2.0 Beta are given below.

    • Nokia/MeeGo

      • WeTab tablet with MeeGo spotted in IFA

      • New Screenshots Of MeeGo UI Show A Lot Of Potential

      • New MeeGo User Interface Screens Emerge

      • Official MeeGo screenshots, looking better than ever before

      • WeTab tablet spotted running MeeGo at IFA

      • WeTab running MeeGo

    • Android

      • MIT app turns your Android phone into a supercomputer… of sorts

        Oh, sure — a few people have called Google’s Nexus One a “superphone,” but suddenly, that nickname has taken on a whole new level of meaning. A team of talent from MIT has put its head down in order to concoct a new Android application that can come darn close to solving complex computational problems in just a fraction of the time that it’d take a bona fide supercomputer.

      • Google TV Developer Platform: What to Expect

      • Google TV to launch in autumn in US and 2011 worldwide

        Schmidt also used the keynote to clarify the situation regarding the company’s upcoming Chrome operating system, scotching rumours that a Google-branded tablet was planned that would be running the new Linux-based Internet focused operating system. Schmidt clarified that Chrome was aimed at the netbook category.

      • Android Notifier sends notifications to your desktop

        If you’ve ever used Android for any period of time, you know that the notification system can be both a blessing and a curse — it’s one of the most powerful, useful, and flexible approaches out there, but if you don’t keep up, your menu bar can stack up into a mess of cryptic numbered icons. So we were really hoping Android Notifier could help us with that — it pipes notifications to your OS X desktop over WiFi or Bluetooth.

      • Get an Early Gmail Update on Your Android Phone

      • Android Notifier Sends Notifications from Your Phone to Your Desktop

      • Android Notifier bringing incoming calls and alerts to your desktop

  • Tablets

    • Dual-Screen Kno Tablet To Be Available by Year’s End

      Does the lure of playing with “the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made” tempt you? How about those dual 14.1-inch touchscreens? (That’s a combined might of 28.2-inches!) Kno has received $46m investment, with an end-of-year launch already penciled-in.

      After being shown off at the D8 event in June, we were bowled over by the idea of having two capacitive IPS screens, measuring 14.1-inches each. That’s a seriously large tablet, but could be the closest thing we see to Microsoft’s Courier, which has now been binned.

    • Google Says “Froyo is Not Optimized for Use on Tablets”

      Speaking to TechRadar, Google’s director of products for mobile Hugo Barra explained that it all comes down to apps, and the way they work on tablets—or don’t work. “The way Android Market works is it’s not going to be available on tablets that don’t allow devices and applications to run correctly.”

Free Software/Open Source

• Open-Xchange 6.18 integrates data from social networks

  Nuremberg-based collaboration software specialist Open-Xchange has released an update, version 6.18, to its email and groupware solution. The company says that the most important of the 100 improvements in the release concern the integration of data from social networks and the option of managing, within Open-Xchange, email from external providers.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 3.6 gains anti-clickjacking support, Thunderbird & SeaMonkey updated

      Firefox 3.6.9 now supports the X-FRAME-OPTIONS header, which enables web servers to forbid clients from opening downloaded pages in iframes. Clickjacking involves an attacker website inserting a transparent iframe containing, for example, Facebook content under the cursor. Users think they are clicking on the visible web page, but are in fact clicking on elements in the transparent Facebook iframe.

    • Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 Beta 5

• Databases

  • Version 2.0 of NoSQL database Redis released

    Version 2.0 of the NoSQL database Redis database has been released with new features including virtual memory support, a hash datatype and publish/subscribe messaing. Development of Redis is assisted by VMware who sponsor Salvatore Sanfillippo and Pieter Noordhuis, lead developers of the project. Sanfillipo was hired by VMware in March.

    Redis is a BSD licensed, key/value store which is written in ANSI C and runs on POSIX systems like Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris and others. Libraries to access the store are available for Ruby, Python, PHP, Erlang, Java, Scala, C#, C, Clojure and JavaScript.

• Project Releases

  • Cairo 1.10.0 available

  • Django 1.2.2 released to close XSS enabling hole

    The Django Project developers have released Django 1.2.2 to close a vulnerability in the Python based web framework which allowed attackers to launch cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. The exploit is, ironically, in the Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection code which was added in version 1.2.

  • IcedTea6 1.9 and VisualVM 1.0

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • USA Today Latest Media Co. to Realize Open is Better

      USA Today is the latest media company to open up its data via an API, the software interface that makes it easy for outside developers to use another company’s data in their applications. The newspaper — which said that it will launch its open API project later this month — joins a small but growing group that includes The Guardian, the New York Times and National Public Radio. The newspaper says it plans to start releasing APIs for specific sections first, including a sports API that provides access to the paper’s database of salaries for players in Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NHL and other sports franchises.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Connexions is going mobile!

      Just think about the possibilities! No longer are you tied to your computer, reading modules online or in PDF format. No longer are you forced to carry around printouts of your materials. Instead you can access Connexions materials at any time, any place.

• Programming

  • InfoWorld review: Nine fine Python development tools

    Object-oriented and dynamic, Python encourages rapid, iterative, and almost exploratory development. But good Python development starts with a good Python IDE. In this roundup, I examine nine Python development environments, many open source, but some commercial. They are Boa Constructor, Eric, ActiveState’s Komodo, Oracle’s NetBeans, Aptana’s Pydev, PyScripter, SPE, Spyder, and WingWare’s Wing IDE.

Leftovers

• ARM reveals Eagle core as Cortex-A15, capable of quad-core computing at up to 2.5GHz

• The End of Bloglines is Nigh – Will Close October 1

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • The Revamped CC Case Studies Project

      Last year, we kicked off our global case studies effort, inviting you to share your stories—individuals, projects, and companies who use Creative Commons for different reasons and to solve different problems. Through the CC wiki, we attempted to capture the diversity of CC creators and content by building a resource that inspires new works and informs free culture.

    • Summary of OER-related comments on U.S. Department of Education Notice of Proposed Priorities