Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 31/5/2011: Pardus 2011.1, Openoffice.org Petition



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • OpenSUSE Workstations Used for Rendering Real Facial Expressions in L.A. Noire (By Rockstar Games)
    Couple of days back, we reported that how a Fedora system running KDE SC4 was used for Animation production in BBC's Doctor Who Series.

    Here is yet another instance where Linux systems are being used for production in entertainment industry. This time Rockstar games, who gave the world Grand Theft Auto series used Linux systems (OpenSUSE/SUSE Linux) in rendering real life facial expressions to the characters in their game L.A. Noire (released on May 17th). Again, KDE is used as the desktop environment. Though I am not able to identify which software (not seems to be native) is being run on the system.


  • Richard Stallman’s Opinion On Dual Booting – “Defenestrate It”
    We all know that Richard Stallman has some very strong, serious and unconventional views on software freedom. Well, someone decided to ask him his view on dual booting Linux with Windows. His reply? "Defenestrate it."

    Defen what? Well, I must also admit that I have never heard this word before. According to Wikipedia, "Defenestration is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window."


  • Desktop Environments



    • GNOME Desktop

      • Problems With The GNOME Shell
        Debates surrounding Linux desktop environments, especially the new Ubuntu Unity shell and the GNOME 3.0 Shell, tend to be very polarized. There also tends to be lots of trolling by users when such debates occur within our forums and elsewhere. But what do graphics driver developers -- and those not out simply to rant -- think of the new desktops? Well, Alex Deucher of AMD recently switched over to the GNOME Shell and he's provided a list of issues he's had with the experience thus far.






  • Distributions



    • New Releases



    • Red Hat Family



      • Fedora

        • Is Fedora 15 Faster Than Ubuntu 11.04?
          Ending out May, we have an interesting set of tests comparing the performance of Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04. This is looking at the "out of the box" performance of both operating systems on three different systems. Not only is the actual test result looked at, but we also compared the power consumption of the two operating systems.

          [...]

          Overall, Ubuntu 11.04 has better disk performance than Fedora 15, but Fedora 15 has better graphics driver support and performance.


        • Fedora Blogs Going Bye-Bye?
          This may turn out to be little more than a rumor, but Mark Terranova (aka markdude) posted that the Fedora Planet blog would soon be discontinued. This comes just a few weeks after the Fedora Talk service was retired.

          Red Hat stock has seen a lot of growth the last several years. It reached a recent high of nearly $49 a share in December 2010 and has remained in the 40's all this year. It spent years floating around $20 for after rising respectably in 2005. It hit its lowest point since 2004 with the stock market crash of November 2008 trading at little over $9 a share. However, it's been climbing fairly steadily since. The only worrisome spots came when players in higher management dumped large blocks of stocks a few times. All that to say Red Hat has done well for itself and isn't exactly going broke.


        • NetworkManager Downgraded


        • Annoying QA fails: NetworkManager


        • Fedora Board’s Town Hall


        • Preupgrade Fedora 14 to Fedora 15






    • Debian Family



      • Derivatives



        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Pelagicore Signs Up to Ubuntu Core for In-vehicle Infotainment Development
            Open source automotive infotainment development specialists, Pelagicore has adopted Canonical’s Ubuntu Core to build new embedded experiences based on broad architecture and open source technologies for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.


          • Mobica Adopting Ubuntu Core For Embedded Device Development
            Mobica is partnering with Canonical in the adoption of Ubuntu Core, a sub-set of Ubuntu technologies suited for the next generation of Internet-enabled embedded devices such as In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems, set top boxes, smart TV and digital devices for the home. Mobica, providers of high-end software development and integration services, is among a number of Canonical partners adopting Ubuntu Core to build new embedded experiences based on broad architecture and open source technologies.


          • Canonical rubbishes Android tablets
            UBUNTU LINUX DISTRIBUTOR Canonical believes the Motorola Atrix is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to smartphones that are able to transform themselves into more traditional computing devices.

            The dual-core Atrix was launched in May and came equipped with the optional extra of a ‘Lapdock' which, when used to dock the phone, could turn it into a regular netbook.



          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 11 Review
              The live CD does not come with the proprietary codecs, however you can install them now from the link provided in the welcome screen and in the Linux Mint menu. You can otherwise upgrade to the DVD edition to have the codecs installed by default.


            • What is the sense of gNewSense?


              Most distros (apart from chosen few who violate first type) satisfy both criteria. With small exception. There are too many things around us which are covered by non-free (of second type) license. Most famous examples are MP3 decoder and hardware firmware.














Free Software/Open Source



  • Web Browsers

    • on the story of browser names
      One of the early graphical web browser that got really popular was Mosaic, developed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Some folks from the team, along with SGI founder Jim Clark, decided that it's worth a venture and formed a company, originally called Mosaic Communication and then later renamed to Netscape Communication.


    • Tech Blog: Do We Still Care About The Browser Wars?
      Remember when people used to argue about Internet Explorer versus Netscape? Seems like light-years ago, but that era was big enough for documentaries to be produced and books written about it. These days, IE's market share is plummeting while Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari are all gaining ground fast. So the browser wars still exist, you just don't hear much talk about it anymore.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



  • Education

    • Local Libraries Introduce New System Tuesday
      The consortium is moving away from a proprietary system, SirsiDynix’s Horizon Integrated Library System, to an open source software system dubbed BiblioOak and based on a framework called Evergreen.






Leftovers





Clip of the Day



Murray Perahia plays Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata 3rd Movement [HQ]



[an error occurred while processing this directive]



Credit: TinyOgg

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 27/03/2026: Studying Whale Births, Apple is Cancelling Products, Cambodia Arrests Journalists Over Photographs
Links for the day
Perpetual Strikes to Begin at European Patent Office (EPO), Large Majority Votes for Strikes Any Day of the Week
Approved industrial actions [...] Notice how none of the media or even so-called 'IP' blogs write about it
 
Gemini Links 28/03/2026: Echo Delay and 0x0.st
Links for the day
Rumours of More IBM Mass Layoffs at Beginning of April
IBM is not doing well
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 27, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, March 27, 2026
"Headcount" as Distraction From Mass Layoffs and Salary Reductions
Things aren't looking well when one considers revenue is acquired, not earned
"Linux" Slop Turning Rarer, New York Times Nowadays Contaminated With LLM Slop
Another day has passed without much slop about "linux"
Gemini Links 27/03/2026: GTD, Gopher Catchup, Gemini Crawlers, and "Slop Everywhere"
Links for the day
Mozilla Was Ruined Like Sirius Open Source Was Ruined - From the Top Down
Mozilla will never return to its Free software roots
Nokia Could Never Recover From Microsoft
It's very important to remember what really happened
Why Techrights and Many Other Sites Stopped Doing April Fools’ Day Articles
Well before slop (made by LLMs) it was "bad optics" to have satire or humour in a site, irrespective of the day of the year
President Not-Cocaine Campinos Notified of Historic EPO Strikes (Thousands of Workers Not Coming Back to the Office)
Please do pay attention to how the media treats these strikes in Europe's second-largest institution
Slides From the Presentation Discussing EPO Strikes Until End of June or Until End of 2026 (Maybe Next Year Too)
More to come soon (later today)
IBM Cuts Are Everywhere (Global), the Aim is to Lower the Pay
Because the revenues keep falling (IBM buys other companies' revenues using borrowed money)
Mozilla is Not a Privacy Company, Mozilla is Run by GAFAM Executives and Managers Who Came From American Surveillance Companies
Would you trust a VPN they claim to be "free"?
SLAPP Censorship - Part 25 Out of 200: That Time Matthew J. Garrett Got Temporarily Banned/Suspended From Twitter
That he gets banned from large social control media platform is hardly surprising given his combative communications
Ubuntu Started as Free With ShipIt, Now It Becomes Payware That Exploits Debian Volunteers (Slaves)
"Ubuntu" the distro now replaces the GNU components inherited from Debian with a bunch of Microsoft GitHub (proprietary) things that reject reciprocal licences
Last Night The Register MS Published a Fake Article. It Mentioned "AI" 27 Times.
Paid-for nonsense! [...] What's left of once-respectable news sites actively harms society
Links 27/03/2026: Google Executive (GAFAM, US, Surveillance) "Named the New BBC Head", Prominent Climate Scientist Resigns From NASA
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/03/2026: "Being Busy" and "Posting Again"
Links for the day
GNOME Has No "Real" Executive Director, Only an IBM (Perma)'Interim' One With No Openings in Sight
GNOME is having financial problems
Microsoft Experiencing "Leadership Exodus"
Microsoft's current position is no better than Meta's (Facebook)
GNU/Linux Distros Should Reject "Age Verification" and Uphold Software Freedom for Users
It's not about protecting children
Slop Plunge
we can already "smell the blood" of the so-called 'AI industry'
IBM Media Puff Pieces While Layoffs Go On and On
Has the PR industry absorbed the press?
Media Says Microsoft Hiring Freezes, But There Are Already Microsoft Layoffs
They want the public to talk about Microsoft as if it's just not hiring when it is actually firing
Richard Stallman lynchings: Sruthi Chandran splitting Debian
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 26, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, March 26, 2026
Links 26/03/2026: Tor Relay at National Taiwan Normal University, Copyright Hammers Fall
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/03/2026: "The War of the Worlds" and "sometimes science is just the dumbest thing"
Links for the day
The World Wide Bots
The shape of the Web is so bad that bots exceed humans in some places
Links 26/03/2026: Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Closes 101 Law Firms in 2 Years, "Please Compensate the Work You Appreciate"
Links for the day
Regaining Software Freedom Means Regaining Control Over Programs That Run on Our Devices
Richard Stallman will speak in Italy
Microsoft Secure Boot Removes Users' Choice
Has Greenland banned Microsoft and 'secure' boot yet?
IBM Pushes Workers Out, It Does Not Count Them as "Layoffs"
The number of IBM layoffs can be as large as tens of thousands per year
Hard to Find a Job After Working for Microsoft (Back Doors Giant, Bribery Hub)
It generally looks like people who chose to serve Microsoft's agenda don't end up too well
Microsoft Lost 31% Of Its Alleged "Value" in Five Months, Then It Got Downgraded
In 2026 Microsoft focuses on keeping the layoffs silent
Altering Perceived Reality to Make It Seem Like Microsoft is Thriving, Not Failing
pretend XBox did not die
SLAPP Censorship - Part 24 Out of 200: The Failed Effort by Brett Wilson LLP to Strike Out My Lawsuit and My Wife's Lawsuit Against Garrett (the Master Allowed Our Lawsuits to Proceed)
This is lawfare
Official New Figures Show That Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Sees Rise in Dishonesty Among Law Firms Forcibly Shut Down ('Euthanised' Due to Misconduct)
It's rather if in our little country as many as 16 law firms were found to be so dishonest that they needed to be shut down
Back to Normalcy
In our datacentre at least
IBM is "Increasing Its Temporary and Part-time Headcount" While Net Headcount Falls (Despite Buying Many Companies and Their Workforce)
Headcount is a rather superficial yardstick.
Confluent Insiders: IBM Laid Off Over 800 at Confluent, Not Just 800
For the record, the layoffs at Confluent won't be over. After the bluewashing there will be "IBM RAs" impacting Confluent folks, aside from PIPs
EPO Union Decides to Continue Industrial Actions, Next Strike in Four Days
The latest strike had the highest participation rate
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 25, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Microsoft's "Silent Layoffs" in Slop Clothing
"AI-powered transformation" is just a euphemism for mass layoffs
Where and How to Spot LLM Slop
Many people correctly perceive LLMs as a site's downfall, a step towards the abyss
Public Talk by Richard Stallman in Half a Day "at the Engineering and Architecture Campus of Cesena of the University of Bologna"
He'll probably attract a fairly large crowd
Gemini Links 26/03/2026: Buying a House, Stargazing, OFFLFIRSOCH 2026
Links for the day