Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE at 4:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Quick endorsement of Fedora 14 and KDE 4.5.x
YESTERDAY there were almost no posts at all. The reason is, well… I was setting up a new machine that had arrived with Windows on it. Obviously I just wiped Windows and installed the latest Fedora 14 with KDE desktop. I am sorry to say that I have not found a single bug yet. Any person who looks for something that works brilliantly out of the box and is easy to use should take a look at the KDE spin of Fedora 14. I have not had a chance to test the main ISO, which is GNOME based. I downloaded it but did not burn it. Either way, I am sticking with Fedora and the least I can do is recommend it to other people. The KDE team also deserves praises for excellent work it did to deliver 4.5.x, which is polished. Another user of Fedora with KDE is Pamela Jones from Groklaw. █
Posted in GNU/Linux at 4:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell is a company where people come to end their career and we show this by going through two weeks of Novell news and demonstrating relative idleness
IT is quite shocking how little news there has been from/about Novell in recent weeks (and there was lots more four years ago, not just months ago). It’s like the company died and therefore it’s hard to find anything clueful to write about it. It has been about a fortnight since our last post about Novell’s progress, so here is yet another which is very concise unless and except in places where there is something worth adding.
SCO
Groklaw has kept track of SCO vs Novell and at the end of last month it posted an update:
Here it is, Novell’s appeal brief in SCO v. Novell. It’s responsive to SCO’s earlier filing, which you can find in our permanent Novell Appeals page.
Stock
Novell mostly appears in some news in the context of finance. Here are the headlines we have found of articles that mention NOVL (about 50% of all the items Google News has picked for “novell”):
From IDG (also in this domain) we learn that: “Unfortunately, BES Express is still unavailable for Novell (NOVL) GroupWise and other corporate mail servers.”
This new item says: “These and other enterprises are benefiting from Cloud Sherpas expertise migrating users from on-premise platforms-like Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise-to the cloud with Google.”
The fact that M+Archive was designed to seamlessly integrate with the municipality’s Novell GroupWise system was also essential.
GroupWise is additionally mentioned in yet another one of Messaging Architects’ new press releases (also here) and TechRepublichas published “Five tips for successfully migrating from GroupWise to Exchange 2010″ (TechRepublic is quite a Microsoft booster in general).
Our servers are a range of Microsoft and Novell. The reasoning behind the Novell environment is that Government has predominately been a Novell client and DPMC has for that reason retained its Groupwise email system. DPMC is extremely reliant on its use of email, so having Groupwise gives us the resilience and availability we require, and its support requirements are considerably lower than [Microsoft] Exchange. There is also the aspect of security of emails that has kept us with Groupwise.
GroupWise is supposed to add some Pulse functionality (the plan is not yet entirely known, especially after Google dumped Wave) and TechWeb, which Novell is paying (Novell is a sponsor), has just published not one but two articles that mention Novell’s Pulse (David Berlind’s article calls Pulse “island of technology” though):
Novell is forging ahead with the development of Pulse, a real-time enterprise communication and collaboration platform that relies on Wave’s federation protocol. Announced a year ago, Pulse was made available to a limited number of users as a preview starting in March. The company won’t say exactly what it plans to announce at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, but chances are it will have something to do with wider availability.
Philosophically, Novell is the closest to having the right vision. It’s just that it may have placed its bet on the wrong horse. At the last E2, Novell demonstrated how, using Google’s open Wave Federation Protocol (WFP), the same activity stream could be hosted in both Novell’s Pulse and Google’s Wave. The idea being that if you picked Google’s Wave as your company’s activity stream host of choice and your ad agency picked Novell’s Pulse as its activity stream host of choice, neither of you would have to compromise. Both of you could have visibility into the same events. But despite its open source nature, WFP is by no means a standard. Not only don’t any other activity stream hosts or “event providers” support it, Google discontinued development on Google Wave itself earlier this year. Theoretically, work on WFP can carry on. But so far, there’s been no rallying cry from the industry to get behind it. For all its good intentions, even Novell’s Pulse is an island of technology.
But “people are going to use social tools for business whether the tools are provided by IT or not,” warned Wendy Steinle, marketing director for Novell Pulse. Yes, for business and for pleasure, the Twitter tweets and Facebook posts still fly from phones and computers all the day long, no matter what an employer has to say about the matter. Sure, a company can give an offending tweeter the boot but that’s a bit like locking the house after the burglar leaves with all your stuff. Sadder still if the offending post breaks compliance and the lawman locks you up for the burglary.
People
“If you’re the coach, you must know all the players” is a post on a subject we mentioned about two weeks ago and Novell’s PR does too. It’s an advertisement, but the statement in the headline goes a long way. In order to understand Novell’s impact one must also see where its former managers go.
Prior to xkoto, which was acquired by Teradata, Patrick was vice president and general manager at Novell Inc., where he managed the SUSE Linux and Netware operating system lines. He joined Novell in 2003, as part of the acquisition of Ximian, where he was president and CEO. He also served in senior roles with The Learning Company, Mattel, WordStar, Sun Microsystems, Ashton-Tate and Lotus.
Additionally, the company also announced its board of directors, which includes Yves Michali (formerly of Novell, Microsoft, Mobiclick, and Groove Network), Yvan Morel de Westgaver (formerly an executive at EDS), and Bart Luyten, general partner at BAMS Angel Fund.
He has also worked as CIO for Novell (1990 – 1995), Franklin Templeton (1995 – 1999), Beyond.com (1999 – 2000), ToysRUs.com (2000 – 2001), eBay and formerly Wells Fargo subsidiary, BillPoint (2001 – 2003).
Campus
The Provo-based Novell campus is mentioned for the following reason:
The Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum (UVEF) will induct Hal Wing of Wing Enterprises into its UVEF Hall of Fame tonight at the Provo Novell Campus. Inductees represent individuals and organizations with an enduring legacy of entrepreneurial excellence.
Now, through a series of agreements with Provo city, UTA and others, this 2 1/2-acre scrap metal yard will be moving to a 53-acre property at 1776 S. Colorado Ave. (East of Novell) and into a new state-of-the-art recycling center.
Novell could use some recycling. The company itself needs to be recycled.
The company specifies that its new product will simplify the identity management provisioning process and deliver a consistent framework for managing identities across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
Self Praise
In a self-promotional press release, Novell mentioned that so-called ‘magic’ quadrant from Gartner, which is a corruptible analyst that one needs to pay to receive some good words. From the opening paragraph:
Novell today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning.* Covering vendors and solutions that manage identities across systems and applications, the Gartner report cites compliance as the main driver for uptake of products.
The thing about those ‘prizes’ though, is that they’re open to abuse and this one too is potentially a new example:
Trend Micro swept the Product Innovation category of Network Security Software, beating out nearest competitors Novell and Websense.
Who judges this and how?
Intelligent Workload and Other Marketing Fluff
Novell has made almost nothing out of PlateSpin, which it spent hundreds of millions of dollars on. PlateSpin’s sale to Novell is mentioned in the Canadian press again;
This fund, which is closed to new investors, has outperformed its peers largely because of a fortuitous investment in software maker PlateSpin Ltd., which was bought in 2008 by Novell Inc. “That is the fundamental holding which drove the returns,” said Scott Clark, managing director of Covington Capital Corp.
A lot of PlateSpin’s main people have left Novell since then and Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management or more of a rebrand. It managed to get some press, especially from Vodacom at the moment. The latter article says: “By using Novell’s WorkloadIQ solutions, Vodacom Business services can support a customer’s IT environment through workload migration, virtual and physical data replication and protection to achieve a scalable cloud.”
It is the same here. Proprietary software from Novell finds some way to have itself promoted. Usually Novell is just mentioned in a long list of vendors with an offer in virtualisation (some additional examples omitted from this post) and here is an example of how these things go:
CED Solutions is a Microsoft CPLS, Certified Partner for Learning Solutions; Cisco Learning Partner Associate; EC Council, Novell, SCA, and training partner with many other vendors.
Storage software provider Novell had also launched Novell Cloud Manager, an umbrella operating system that controls virtualized operating systems working on multiple hypervisors. It currently supports hypervisors including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and open source Xen operating systems, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Microsoft Windows server and Red Hat Enterpries.
It’s common to find Novell listed like this. Not many articles are written just about Novell anymore. Here is IDG giving away exam details for “Novell Certified Linux Administrator”. It is more of a content dump from IDG, it’s not journalism at all.
Marketing fluff (e.g. “Clouds over Manhattan”) is the main thing that keeps Novell in some news while the management arranges the sale of their company. Over in YouTube there are over a dozen videos like [1, 2] from account Novell ChalkTalks, which we never saw before by the way. It’s probably another account held by Novell.
In the next installment of our Novell partner podcast series, Liz Padula, senior marketing manager at Novell, talks with Marc Haberkorn, product manager in the WebSphere team at IBM, about how IBM is working with Novell to deliver a portfolio of software appliances across many of its brands, including WebSphere, powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Novell has also just put out this press release to tell people that SLE* is not dead. It’s just probably on its way to VMware, along with OpenSUSE which has new/interim leaders interviewed. Novell is not a good place to be right now, definitely not when it comes to job security. GNU/Linux and SUSE are not going away because they are GPL-licensed, but what will keep SUSE safe from competition? Here is one new article about Teradata:
The cluster runs Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, the Teradata 13.10 database, and has a management console that runs on Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003. This DMA 560 machine is being positioned not only as an entry data mart box, but also as a BI application test and development machine.
It’s important to remember that the future of Novell is quite orthogonal to the future of GNU/Linux because the code will live on and companies like Teradata do not rely on SLE* as they can use RHEL too. To say negative things about Novell is by all means not to harm GNU/Linux; Rather, it’s to defend GNU/Linux from Microsoft patent tax. █
Summary: Microsoft’s actions suggest that it is losing a lot of money on KINect, so there is no guarantee that the project will exist for a long time to come
ICROSOFT advertises KINect like advertising budget restraints have been abolished. According to a source we cited recently, close to half a billion dollars are spent just marketing this thing, which is not even in the hands of many people yet (will it ever?). We talk about it a lot in our show, TechBytes, especially because Tim — an Xbox 360 owner — keeps track of the product and ridicules the KINect in his blog this week:
I think you will be the guinea pigs and we will be reading about issues you have with the device in the coming months.
When/if one cancels out all the marketing noise, it becomes evidence that KINect has many problems which we covered in posts such as:
An amateur hacker claims to have freed Microsoft’s Kinect from the Xbox, a feat that allows him to control the the just-released motion-tracking game device from his Windows PC.
The claim was documented in two videos released over the weekend by a member of the Natural User Interface Group. In one, Kinect’s motorized-tilt is shown being controlled with the moveup and movedown buttons of his Windows 7 PC. Normally, the movements can only be tracked when Kinect is connected to an Xbox 360 game console.
A second video shows the Kinect outputting color and depth data to the hacker’s PC.
By themselves, the videos don’t prove that the Kinect has been completely rooted, but they suggest that the NUI Group member AlexP is well on his way. The videos surfaced a few days after Adafruit Industries, a seller of DIY electronics kits, offered a $2,000 bounty to the first person who published open-source drivers for the Kinect.
There is a debate over whether Microsoft makes money from KINect or just gives it away with subsidy, thus incurring a financial loss. Either way, only time will tell if KINect too will end up in the pile of dead products from Microsoft. In the past 3 years Microsoft has killed nearly 60 products (those which we documented anyway) and even Apple is starting to kill some of its products. Here is what Pogson said about Apple exiting the servers market:
The first Apple server I saw was a box on the doorstep of the school left during Christmas Break. I was not in charge of receiving parcels so I put it inside and left it there. I went in and found we had not Internet access. The fools at Head Office sent us an e-mail, during Christmas Break. I struggled to find what was wrong locally. Everything seemed fine. Finally, I phoned Head Office and was informed that the box contained our new router which Head Office was allowing to connect to the WAN and no others… Sigh. I reminded them about Christmas Break… “Oh!” the voice said… Anyway, I plugged in that server and had DHCP and a route once again. That was the year I first installed GNU/Linux on top of that other OS. I have had a stomache-churning response to seeing Apple servers ever since. Fortunately there are not many out there. Now there will be fewer over time. Too bad I will retire soon. The world is becoming a better place.
Marketing is not enough for success. It can help create initial hype (like KINect’s and Silverlight’s, or most famously Vista with the “show us your wow” campaign), but if the products fail in practice (Xbox 360 RRoD for example) then it’s all doomed to fail sooner or later. Marketing is deception and it’s a short-term investment because people cannot be deceived indefinitely. █
Summary: Finland’s story of migrations to OpenOffice.org is told in a comprehensive formal document; Romania goes the other way and ISO continues to show why it is severely flawed
Tampere University has just released this 234-page thesis whose PDF version has been downloaded nearly 700 times and whose abstract reads as follows:
This study investigates the largest transition in Finland to an open source office suite and to an open standard for office documents. The IT environment of the open source OpenOffice.org migration involves more than 10 000 workstations in the Finnish Ministry of Justice and its administrative sector.
Methodologically, the research is a longitudinal innovation adoption study covering the 7-year time span from 2003 to 2010. The study applies and tests the organizational innovation adoption process model originally developed by Everett Rogers. In addition to the theory-testing approach, the study includes artifact-building and artifact-evaluation activities of design research. The research view of the study introduces a participatory researcher’s implementation perspective where the researcher as a staff member of the organization has been in charge of the adoption of the innovation in the organization.
The findings of the study provide contributions both to IS research and practice. The events of the study give reason to suggest that the characteristics of the open source software with low-cost licenses call for improvements in the organizational innovation adoption stage model. The findings suggest that the predefined order of stages in the innovation process and sharp distinctions between stages should not be expected in organizational innovation adoption. As a new model and method, the study provides a complementary framework for the instrumentation and documentation of the open source innovation process in the organizational context. The study confirms several results from previous research and practice, especially the importance of top management support, systematic open source skill building and the presence of innovation champions in the adoption of open source solutions.
For IS practice, the study shows that the transition to an open source office suite is feasible in a large-scale context and that substantial benefits can be achieved as the result of the transition. For the user organizations of open source software, lower cost has been the most commonly cited benefit and one of the main reasons for adopting open source. Other often cited considerations include strategic goals like the facilitation of more sovereign IT governance and the reduction of vendor dependence through open source solutions and open standards. The study addresses several practically important issues involved in the adoption of open source, e.g., the analysis of software functionality and interoperability, cost evaluations, installation and configuration issues, local language support issues, additional tools to support the migration, user training and support, technical support, and software usage measurements. The evaluation of costs in the study indicates that the migration to the open source office suite platform will benefit the target organization of the study with impressive cost savings when compared to the deployment of a comparative proprietary office suite platform. The study applies numerous best practice approaches which together with the rich insight provided by the research should benefit other organizations considering open source office suite adoptions both from the perspectives of management and implementation.
One would expect Finland to be ahead when it comes to Free software, at the very least because it’s the country Linux came from. In Romania, which some people have just told us is known for higher corruption rates, Microsoft manages to reign, still. One Romanian reader messaged us yesterday to say that: “While EU is abandoning proprietary software, Romanian civil servants learn to use MS Office http://tinyurl.com/33j8xwk (Google Translate)”
For more information about the situation in Romania see:
A few of the links above (especially the last two) speak about how Microsoft seemingly corrupted the vote on OOXML in Romania. In turn it forces a lot of the population to buy Microsoft Office or be called “pirate”.
Finland’s migration to OpenOffice.org is not unique. There are other countries that do the same thing, Malaysia for example. The important thing is that parts of the Finnish government will be able to exchange information with the public in ODF format. OOXML (and other Microsoft Office formats) is proprietary, so no government should ever use/require it, thereby imposing the purchase of a particular set of products from one single company with dubious history.
After sixteen years of working in parallel to the traditional standards infrastructure, the World Wide Web Consortium has taken an interesting decision: to begin submitting selected W3C Recommendations to that same system for endorsement. In doing so, it joins the small handful of consortia (seven, to be exact) that have applied for this option out of the hundreds of consortia currently active in the information and communications (ICT) to apply for that option.
If this process sounds vaguely familiar, that’s likely because this is the same process that OASIS used to gain global endorsement of its OpenDocument Format (ODF). Microsoft took a similar, but procedurally distinct, route with OOXML, its competing document format, when it offered it to ECMA, which enjoys a special “Fast Track” relationship with JTC1. What won’t sound familiar is the conditions that the W3C has successfully included in its application to make submissions, on which more below.
Summary: Microsoft’s lobbyists are pushing for software patents to enter Europe at the moment, via the European Patent
MICROSOFT JUST cannot leave Europe alone. If not directly then indirectly it is trying to render software freedom “illegal”, using software patents of course. Working to expand a US-style system to Europe Microsoft created or recruited the ACT lobbyists, whose member Mr. Sax [1, 2, 3, 4] is now quoted in Murdoch’s press and his bosses are pleased about that:
ACT’s @mikesax quoted in WSJ advocating for European Patent, http://on.wsj.com/bclLeU
That’s just lobbying and anyone who knows anything about ACT is aware of the relationship with Microsoft. It is rogue group of lobbyists whom almost nobody pays attention to except those that they lobby (to inject the paymasters’ point of view), just like with mobbyists who mass-mail journalists. It is intended for people like Quickenborne [1, 2, 3] to be influenced by it now that they have a “special meeting”. Watch some more new patent propaganda of this type from Murdoch’s press, serving the American monopolies. It’s very strongly pro-software patents in Europe. “EU: Software patents will come in whether you want them or not,” summarises the president of the FFII in reference to this article. Glyn Moody hasresponded in the article “A Patent No-brainer, Mr Willetts”, adding separately that “US system of software patents is the last thing you want to copy” (of course! It’s an advantage for the UK over the US when there are no software patents, for reasons Richard Stallman explained).
The last thing Europe needs to inherit from the United States is the patent law. There are truly wonderful things about the United States, but the patent system is not one of them. Here is a legal type, Patrick Anderson, telling a disaster tale that’s not at all fiction: [via]
The $80,000 “Reasonable” Website Modification
[...]
So, what I’m NOT going to do is discuss the relative value of combining electronic “pointing” methods, with information hierarchies for rapid navigation of content ca. 1990. Not only is this high speculative, not to mention well outside my expertise, but it is also overly complicated and (for the most part) entirely irrelevant. As with any other price tag, a company like Webvention will likely try and get as much as its “customers” are willing to pay. Truthfully, the $80,000 price tag is entirely reasonable for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the technical merit of the invention.The difference here is how patent licenses are “sold.”
When I go to buy a pair of jeans, I’m mainly thinking about what quality jeans I am getting, and whether I can get a comparable, or better, pair from someone else, for less money. The inherent costs in making a purchase (e.g. my time and the amount gas I use driving to the store) are largely irrelevant, or at best dwarfed by the cost of the product itself. In the case of patent licensing, what a given company is “willing to pay” is governed by as much (in some cases more by) the cost of making the purchase in the first place. There is a default negotiation process, called litigation, that brings with it certain, unavoidable costs (primarily in the form of lawyers).
The reasonableness of the $80,000 pricetag is exemplified by the actions of Five Star Quality Care, Novartis, Tenneco, Instinet and TriMas. Each of these companies have apparently received similar letters from Webventions, with similar demands for a license fee. Given this demand, the company has two basic options: respond or ignore. Those that ignore the demand will, in all likelihood, end up a party to a lawsuit at some indefinite point in the future, similar to Webvention v. Adidas, and Webvention v Abercrombie & Fitch, where about a dozen companies each stand accused of ignoring Webvention’s claims and continuing to infringe Webvention’s patent.
This is the last thing that Europe needs. And as Ciaran warns (as he did in the FSFE), the USPTO is getting worse right now rather than better. Dana Blankenhorn responds to it:
In addition to being obvious, the One-Click Patent (and many others) fail my mousetrap test. You should be able to patent a mousetrap design, just not the idea of catching mice.
Some patent attorneys think this weakening of obviousness obviously means it’s going to be easier to sneak obvious ideas through the patent office. That’s Slashdot’s fear as well.
I don’t think it’s quite that obvious.
This time for a change Blankenhorn does not add quotes and talking points from Microsoft Florian (as he has been doing a lot in recent months, maybe in order to start a hits-attracting controversy).
Here is one last item that we caught in the news. It’s about a famous (also controversial) distributor of Linux in a box:
TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) is probably the most famous name in the consumer digital video recorder market, but its market share—estimated to be around 8 percent of the DVR market last year—hardly reflects that anymore. Since cable and satellite companies started getting into the DVR business, TiVo has been steadily edged out. A court case being argued Tuesday could determine whether the company gains some much-needed leverage against its cable and satellite rivals, or instead gets another push toward obscurity.
Summary: Tim and Roy discuss Fedora 14 (which Roy installed today), file sharing, DDOS attacks, and they also cover a variety of GNU/Linux distributions
THIS is the fourth episode, which is also the third episode released in 3 days. OpenBytes has some show notes and in the future the structure of the show will be as follows (as per Tim’s suggestion):
News headlines summary
One discussion point (or guest interview)
Feedback
Close on highlighted artist
This show closes with a lovely song from the lovely Emma Lee (maybe not the same Emma Lee as the famous one). The song is called “That Sinking Feeling” and it was a free download in SXSW 2009 (Showcasing Artists).
If you wish to be on the show or know someone who ought to be on the show, please let us know. As always, if you enjoy this show, please consider recommending it to others and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date. █
Best of Linux So far, in my look at Linux compared to Mac and Windows, I’ve covered music players, photo organizers, and video editors. But all those apps – and all the documents they create – are lost if your hard drive crashes, your laptop takes a spill, or some other catastrophe strikes.
If you have documents, you must have a backup solution – Mac users at least have the option of Time Machine and Windows offers Live Drive. In this final installment of my look at the Linux desktop, I’ll assess how Linux stacks up against backup solutions for Windows and OS X.
Linux user who wants to learn computer programming. Linux is an excellent choice for this, because there are a huge number of programming languages available for it….and all free.
Lets just imagine that we are a programming gurus. We have written all sorts of programs from spread sheets, financial, graphical drawing, GIS and even lotto programs. We have done silly little programs which move animated faces around the screen and written programs for constructing kitchens. When it comes to programming in windows there is nothing we cannot do.
The difference is that things are happening in reverse this time. Linspire, nearing its demise, was becoming more “open” with their Freespire distribution efforts, while Ubuntu is locking down default installations with its Unity desktop. And the Ubuntu application store is demonstrating a remarkable similarity to that of Linspire’s CNR software management concept.
Userful Corporation, the global leader in Linux desktop virtualization, today released a Beta version of it’s Linux alternative to Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010. The software, named Userful MultiSeat Linux 2011TM, turns 1 Linux computer into 10 high performance independent computer stations. It offers the same features as Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, plus some additional features MultiPoint lacks such as hundreds of free educational software applications, and a suite of tools for managing classroom computers.
Calgary, AB – Userful Corporation, the global leader in Linux desktop virtualization, today released a Beta version of its Linux alternative to Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010. The software, named Userful MultiSeat Linux 2011TM, turns 1 Linux computer into 10 high performance independent computer stations. It offers the same features as Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, plus some additional features MultiPoint lacks such as hundreds of free educational software applications, and a suite of tools for managing classroom computers. Userful MultiSeatTM also has higher video performance than Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, and at just $59 per seat (education pricing, commercially available Q4 2010), and with no server licensing costs, it is also a lower cost alternative.
IBM should be grateful that Linux and open source relational databases like MySQL (now from Oracle) and PostgreSQL (which is commercially supported by EnterpriseDB are about as unfamiliar as Vulcan is to those who speak Klingon but have managed a little broken English. (Yes, that was a metaphor for Unix or Linux, IBM i, and Windows.) Because as cheap as the more familiar Windows entry servers are compared to entry and midrange Power7 servers, Linux systems are even less costly.
Linux hasn’t got any Freer between the Linux-2.6.33-libre announcement, back in March, and the present announcement, that marks the release of Linux-2.6.36-libre. Linux now contains more non-Free Software, and more drivers in its Free core that require separately distributed non-Free Software to function.
A new release of the excellent photo manager shotwell isn’t that far off and from development so far it is packing a few new goodies…
Shotwell 0.8 will allow for downloading of any recorded movie files present on your connected camera. The team say that ‘it makes sense to catalogue videos and photos in the same app, using an unified interface.‘
Last week I received a heads up about a new web application launching today from a company called BetterMeans with an impressive goal: to build the infrastructure (processes, technology, governance, etc.) to make an open organizational structure like we talk about here on opensouce.com a reality.
Without anybody noticing, Opera has amassed one of the world’s most valuable commercial resources. And the funny thing is, it isn’t going to do anything evil with it. Marketing, new media and technology pundits may have to rethink a few things once they digest the size of Opera’s well-kept secret. It is possible the gurus may have spent years barking up the wrong tree.
While I keep telling people that you don’t need to use the command line in order to use Linux, I find that it’s a useful and sometimes indispensable tool. I have a number of scripts and utilities that I use at the command line to get various jobs done.
Why? A lot of the time, especially if I’m trying to process a lot of information or a number of files at once, the command line is faster than a comparable GUI tool. Assuming that there is a GUI tool that can do what I do at the command line.
GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.
Ubuntu might be the most popular Linux, but there are two other desktop distributions which have a lot to offer but aren’t getting the publicity they deserve, says Ashton Mills.
mikala has done KDE 4.5.3 packages for Mandriva 2010 Spring, thank you !! this time (or at least for now) the packages aren’t available in KDE FTP as usual but in Mandriva Italia Backports (MIB) FTP.
Mandriva, the publisher of the Mandriva Linux operating system, and the OpenVZ project announced today that the system Operating OpenVZ virtualization software will be included as part of the Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0.
OpenVZ is running on the server system software virtualization technology, built on Linux, which creates isolated, secure virtual environments on a single physical server – enabling greater server utilization and superior availability with fewer performance penalties. The virtual servers ensure that applications are not incompatible and can be rebooted independently.
Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0 is the basis of an open source infrastructure stable and profitable for organizations building on Linux.
Savvytek, a Red Hat Premier Business Partner and Certified Training Partner operating in Jordan, has taken an important step in strengthening its partnership with Red Hat by achieving accreditation as a Red Hat Ready Business Partner to operate in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Qatar.
In the end the impression I get from Fedora is that it is more a development and testing platform than it is a desktop for your average home user. There is very little multimedia support, no Flash, and (on the live CD) no office suite installed by default and the project maintains a short support cycle (about thirteen months). The project has a more friendly feel to it now than it did six months ago, but it is still targeting the more technically inclined members of the community who don’t mind working around the occasional quirk. If you like to stay on the cutting edge without being cut, or if you want to keep up with the technology going into Red Hat, then Fedora 14 is an excellent choice.
The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 43.20, +0.19, +0.44%) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the opening of the 2011 Fedora Scholarship program, recognizing college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. The Fedora Scholarship is awarded to one high school senior each year to assist with the recipient’s college or university education. This will mark the fourth year of this annual scholarship program as the Fedora Project continues to encourage young students to use and contribute to open source software.
Just as a quick reminder, the Fedora Board has been following a new schedule over the past month or so. This new schedule works as follows:
* Every Monday, the Board will meet via phone at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC atm).
* Every other Friday (the next one is this Friday, 12 Nov), the Board will hold a public ‘office hours’ style questions & answers session in #fedora-board-meeting at 2 PM Eastern time.
You’re probably manipulating Debian packages everyday, but do you know what those files are? This article will show you their bowels… Surely they are more than file archives otherwise we would just use TAR archives (you know those files ending with .tar.gz). Let’s have a look!
Welcome to this year’s fifteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Debian and “Google Code-in 2010″
* Report from openSUSE Conference
* Debian Installer 6.0 Beta1 release
* Minutes from mini-DebConf Paris
* Mini-DebConf in Ho Chi Minh City
* Bits from the Website Team
* Further “This week in Debian” interviews
* … and much more.
That’s no accident. Yes, Ubuntu is based on Linux, and the Unity desktop is built on GNOME, but at this point I think Canonical has decided that everyone who’s ever going to use a “Linux” desktop is already there. Therefore, to broaden the Ubuntu Linux desktop base they needed to reach users who know nothing about Linux.
The release schedule for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system has been modified last week on the Ubuntu wiki. The distribution will still be released at the end of April 2011. The first Alpha version was supposed to be available for testing last Thursday, November 4th.
For Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), the Ubuntu developers decided to change the release schedule again, to 3 Alpha versions instead of 5, a single Beta release, and a Release Candidate. Here is the new release schedule for Ubuntu 11.04:
December 2nd, 2010 – Alpha 1 release
February 3rd, 2011 – Alpha 2 release
March 3rd, 2011 – Alpha 3 release
March 31st, 2011 – Beta release
April 21st, 2011 – Release Candidate
April 28th, 2011 – Final release of Ubuntu 11.04
The Linux desktop has been around for more than a decade now. Despite its best efforts, and Microsoft’s dumbest missteps — I’m looking at you, Vista — it’s never owned more than a fraction of the market. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, plans on changing that with its Unity desktop.
Recently I blogged about some concerns that I have had about increasing disrespect in the Open Source, Free Software, and Free Culture communities. My blog entry shared some of the work I started on an OpenRespect Declaration, but I wasn’t sure if I should publish it.
I did some thinking on this, and reviewed some of the fantastic comments on my blog, and I decided to go ahead and launch openrespect.org. There I have listed the declaration with a few extra points about:
* the importance of honesty (thanks Jef Spaleta for the suggestion)
* the importance of remembering that people pour their heart and soul into their work
A lot of you hate any kind of branding in wallpapers and hence will love the default wallpaper collection for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. But some of us including me won’t mind a bit of branding in wallpapers especially if the branding is all about Ubuntu and Linux. Try this simple, elegant collection of Ubuntu wallpapers.
In yet another recent announcement that had the Linux community looking like the proverbial “deer in headlights,” Canonical has announced that in an iteration of Ubuntu it might very well drop X Windows in favor of Wayland. This comes on the heels of Mark Shuttleworth’s recent announcement that 11.04 would see Ubuntu leave behind the GNOME Shell in favor of Ubuntu Unity. That was a tiny drop in the bucket compared to this latest consideration.
This headline caught my eye:Ubuntu To Ditch X For Wayland. Note the word ditch. This gives a negative spin on an otherwise positive story. Ubuntu is supporting Wayland which the person writing calls a “more modern alternative” to X and likes the decision. So why write it in a negative light if they are supporting something that is worthy of support?
There have been hundreds of such posts. Ubuntu Ditches GNOME or Ubuntu Dumps GNOME are examples. The theme here is that Canonical or Ubuntu are bad boys. Words like ditch and dump are succinct, but pejorative, implying that Ubuntu and Canonical are disloyal philanderers or worse.
Without being a X expert, some of the issues that were critical in the (announced) move from X server to Wayland
Hardware support : I strongly recommend to run Linux only on hardware with a well supported video driver : without a well supported driver, the experience can be daunting, especially on a thin-client. X was supposed to be hardware independent, lightweight and provide great performance.
However these fights had been lost long ago : I’ve learned the hard way that not all X drivers are equals : open-source or not, how many XV channels are supported, 3D (what version exactly, etc.). In fact, selecting good quality desktop or thin-client hardware is a service we sold to our customers !
Size matters : a default X.org server, on my desktop where I wrote this blog is 64Mb (without cache), 180Mb (with cache) on a Ubuntu 10.10, 64 bit with regular 3D effects. Well, on a phone with 256Mb or RAM or on an ARM based thin client with 64Mb, this is not good. I can imagine it also has an impact on battery life on the mobile devices.
To the logical mind, it is quite clear why Shuttleworth has taken these steps. He has tried, for some time, unsuccessfully, to get upstream projects to follow his vision for what GNU/Linux on devices – the desktop, the notebook, the netbook, the plethora of mobiles – should look and feel like.
Having failed to convince anyone, he has now decided that if Ubuntu is to continue to make headway, it has to distinguish itself from the rest. His model is Apple, which, despite having a much smaller share of the market than Microsoft, is still a major force with which to reckon in the tech space.
Shuttleworth isn’t in a great hurry; he appears to be fully aware of the magnitude of the changes he is undertaking, with statements like this about the switch to Wayland: “Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem.”
This is Issue #217 for the period October 17th, 2010 – November 7th, 2010 and is available in full here.
In this issue we cover:
* UWN Catchup, Help the Graner Family
* Ubuntu 11.04 to Ship Unity
* Unity on Wayland
* Emmet Hickory replaces Richard Johnson on Community Council
* Ubuntu Cloud Community Needs You
* Yes, we did it: SpreadUbuntu.org is up now!
* Ubuntu Stats
* First Mountain View Ubuntu Hour
* Meet Ian Booth
* New Features for Bug Supervisors
* Stéphane Graber: Edubuntu live now available online
* Daniel Holbach: Much Imporved Harvest Online Again
* Randall Ross: Wither Brainstorm
* Matt Zimmerman: Ubuntu and Qt
* Valorie Zimmerman: Listening to Our Better Angels
* Raphael Hertzog: Managing distribution-specific patches with a common source package
* Jorge Castro: How I use Banshee
* Ubuntu, open source apps use on the rise: Linux Users Group
* Donate your bandwidth to support Ubuntu downloads
* Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat: One Hit, One Miss
* Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast
* Boosting Ubuntu’s Productivity: 20 Tips
* Ubuntu Netbook 10.10: Usability vs. Constraints
* Unity and uTouch
* Banshee becomes Ubuntu 11.04 default music player
* Mark Shuttleworth talks Project Harmony, Unity, Windicators and more
* Mark Shuttleworth denies move to Open Core
* London Stock Exchange Sets a New World Record in Trade Speed Using Linux
* Canonical Highlights Touch Support on Ubuntu Netbooks
* Ubuntu UK Podcast S03E19 – If we only knew
* Full Circle Podcast #13: The One Where You’re a Rabbit
* Ucasts 0003: Update Manager Introduction
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security Notices
GTK app Remmina is to replace TSClient as the default remote desktop client in Ubuntu 11.04.
The tool is a capable successor to tsclient with many great features and support for multiple network protocols – including RDP – all of which is wrapped up in a consistant and accessible interface.
A while back, I did a full review of Ubuntu Muslim Edition 10.04 on Desktop Linux Reviews. This time around I’ll be covering the 10.10 version of that distro. The official name of this distro is simply “Sabily,” and this particular release is dubbed “Al Quds.” However, I have simply renamed it “Ubuntu Muslim Edition 10.10″ for this quick look, to make it easier for folks to know exactly what it is.
For those in procurement jobs, the use of desktop productivity tools could be the best way for open source to become more widely adopted across the government, it was argued.
This is the view of the government’s deputy chief information officer Bill McCluggage, who reckons that there is still a lot to be done over the next few years to get a “level playing field for the open source environment”.
Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, Free Software developer and community builder from Iceland, has received the Nordic Free Software Award.
This annual prize was awarded on Saturday by Föreningen för Fri Kultur och Programvara and Free Software Foundation Europe at the Free Software Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) which took place in Gothenburg, Sweden this weekend.
Six years ago today, (9 November 2004), Firefox 1.0 hit the servers.
Development of the browser was officially announced in April 2003 and originally called Phoenix — raising the ire of the trademark holders. Renaming it Firebird raised the ire of the free database software developers, so it was finally branded Firefox nine months before it’s inital release.
It looks to me like Android, thanks to the phone market, is set to join server Linux as being ‘shiny’.
So I predict that the first school slates (as trailed in my previous blog) will be Google-Android powered (…or possibly the OLPC) and that young Africans will prefer them to multipoint ancient hardware….or did you pick the Windows 7 slate?
Given the ongoing and recently increased interest in the open core licensing strategy there have been numerous statements made about its relative popularity, the reasons for its adoption, and the impact it has on collaborative development.
As part of our recently released report on the evolution of open source-related business strategies we evaluated the strategies of 300 companies that are engaged in generating revenue from open source software.
This past Wednesday, I showed up at Baltimore-Washington International for a flight to Providence, R.I. I had a choice of two TSA screening checkpoints. I picked mine based on the number of people waiting in line, not because I am impatient, but because the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack — a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.
Agents were funneling every passenger at this particular checkpoint through a newly installed back-scatter body imaging device, which allows the agency’s security officers to, in essence, see under your clothing. The machine captures an image of your naked self, including your genitals, and sends the image to an agent in a separate room. I don’t object to stringent security (as you will soon see), but I do object to meaningless security theater (Bruce Schneier’s phrase), and I believe that we would be better off if the TSA focused its attentions on learning the identity and background of each passenger, rather than on checking whether passengers are carrying contraband (as I suggested in this article, it is possible for a moderately clever person to move contraband through TSA screenings with a fair amount of ease, even with this new technology).
On Guantánamo, the only comments in the book that have so far emerged are insultingly flippant, which is disgraceful from the man who shredded the Geneva Conventions and authorized an unprecedented program of arbitrary detention, coercive interrogation and torture. In addition, Bush’s baleful legacy lives on in the cases of the 174 men still held, in the recent show trial of Omar Khadr, and in the complacency regarding the basis for detaining prisoners of the “War on Terror” — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks — on which Barack Obama continues to rely, despite its formidable shortcomings.
Lisa Kellman of the Environmental Sciences Research Center at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, and her team have been investigating the impact that forest harvesting has on the underlying soil. It seems that the damage goes deeper than previously thought and lasts for much longer than traditionally assumed.
But there are signs that consumers are asking for more credit.
The New York Fed released data today that appeared to show total available credit card limits — the amount the banks will let us spend if we wish to do so — rose $69 billion to $2.77 trillion. That figure had been falling for seven consecutive quarters, and the reversal seemed significant to me.
But after I posted a blog pointing to the trend, the Fed called to say the numbers might be wrong. Then it said they are wrong. The actual total of credit lines is $2.68 trillion, down around $20 billion from the previous quarter.
The White House is intensifying negotiations with South Korea on revising a free-trade agreement negotiated by the Bush administration, even though the accord still faces opposition from Democratic politicians, labor unions and the Ford Motor Company.
In an unusual detour, Sarah Palin waded into monetary policy Monday, lashing out at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and urging him to “cease and desist” his attempt to jumpstart the economic recovery by committing to buy up to $900 billion in U.S. government debt.
As any student of Economics 101 realises, you can control the price of something, or the quantity, but not both simultaneously. In announcing its decision to purchase an additional $600bn of treasuries last week, the Federal Reserve was presumably motivated to create additional stimulus to an economy, whose growth trajectory has hitherto been insufficient to make a dent in unemployment. Even Friday’s “good” unemployment numbers, where the US economy added 151,000 jobs, was not enough to reduce the current jobless rate of 9.6%.
Germany’s Federal Statistics Office says exports rose 22.5 percent in September compared the same month a year ago as the country continues its recovery from the financial crisis.
It is a somewhat ironic coincidence that on the same day as the American electorate rejected out of hand any more talk of fiscal stimulus, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, writing in the Washington Post, reaffirmed his commitment to a different kind of stimulus – the monetary variety. Starting this month, and continuing up until mid-2011, the Fed intends to buy $600bn of US treasury bonds in the open market. This programme will be known as “quantitative easing 2″ or QE2; its express intention being to tackle unemployment. Unencumbered by an electorate resolutely opposed to a fiscal stimulus, some of the country’s finest monetary economists remain committed to stimulating the economy in an entirely different way.
First, Paul believes that the federal government has minimal power to regulate how private property owners use their property, or how private business owners manage their businesses or employees. In Paul’s interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, he explains that he opposes the ban on whites-only lunch counters because he “believe[]s in private ownership.” During his lengthy interview with Rachel Maddow, Paul explained that he supports the parts of the Civil Right Act of 1964 that limit government discrimination, but that he rejects the “one title” of the Act that limits private activities (for the record, there are at least two titles of the original Civil Rights Act that limit private actors. Title II prohibits discrimination by restaurants, hotels and other public accommodations; Title VII forbids employment discrimination). Similarly, in his interview with NPR, Paul explains that his shield surrounding private businesses extends well beyond the civil rights context. When asked how he feels about “the degree of oversight of the mining and oil-drilling industries,” Paul responded “I think that most manufacturing and mining should be under the purview of state authorities.”
My thinking lately is that the basic concept of copyright is flawed in the digital age. In the days of the first printing presses, the idea was that the creator of a work should have a head-start on the world for copying.
Last month, the Gnutella-based file-sharing client LimeWire was effectively outlawed after a U.S. federal judge granted a request from the RIAA to shut the software down. Now, not even a month later, LimeWire is back as good as new. Not only has a secret dev team reanimated the hugely popular client, but they have also made a few significant changes which make it better and more streamlined than before.
Operation: Payback came roaring into the Internet landscape and left behind a slew of battered websites, a suspended P2P litigation campaign in the UK, an embarrassed law firm, and a humbled KISS frontman. In what may be a new method of Internet activism, or, as some would say, ‘hacktivism’, Operation: Payback has largely concluded its campaign after nearly two months of pillaging various anti-P2P websites. Let’s take look at this bizarre chapter of Internet history.
It all began innocently enough on September 18, 2010. Members of Operation: Payback concluded recruiting enough people across the 4chan message boards, and launched their raid on the MPAA.org’s website with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A lot of media sources will tell you that 4chan attacked the MPAA, but this is not correct. 4chan was merely used as an organizational platform. You’ll also hear this was organized by Anonymous. This too isn’t totally correct. Supporters of Operation: Payback definitely include some members of Anonymous and of 4chan, but the reality is that participants came from numerous organizations and groups, and indeed loners, from across the Internet.
This show closes with a lovely song from 
If you wish to be on the show or know someone who ought to be on the show, please let us know. As always, if you enjoy this show, please consider recommending it to others and 
but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem.”
